Sedom’s Subjects: Sodomy and Urban Politics in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Castile

‘Laws Must Be Made for the Punishment of this Nefarious Crime’: The Construction of the Legal Discourses Against Sodomy

Given the interconnection between the religious and civic spheres, Castilian criminal law on sexual conduct was based on the theological conception, incorporating the Church’s view of the sin of lust, with, however, its particular nuances and objectives. ¹³ The development of these laws was not determined solely by Christian values but by the buena fama (good reputation), the status of the individual and the prevailing social mores.

The sin of lust was framed over the course of the ecclesiastical reform from the second half of the eleventh century to the twelfth century. A fundamental theme of this process was the renovation of canon law, which was to outline the scope of a civil government of the ‘Christian society’. ¹⁴ Canon compilations of the time clearly manifest the reformers’ favour of moral rigour, defining sex and pleasure as being inspired by evil and, consequently, as a source of sin. For this reason, all sexual activity fell under the jurisdiction of the Church. ¹⁵ The first compilation of the reformist canon was the Decretum by Burchard of Worms (1000–25), enumerating the punishments for sexual intercourse between unmarried persons. The message it conveyed was that lust was a matter requiring confession and penance and, concurrently, an offence deserving public punishment and sanction. Canonists severely condemned lust, what we could define as sexual sin, including fornication, adultery, sex with non-Christians, sodomy, bestiality and masturbation. Some years later, towards 1140, the Decretum Gratiani revolutionised canon law, granting it a coherence it had lacked until then. The text defined sexual impulse as a defect, a disease of the mind and body and, of course, labelled some sexual acts as being more grievous than others, as was the case of sodomy and other acts against nature, describing them as nefarious, even worse than adultery and fornication. ¹⁶ This text echoed the opinion Peter Damian had expressed in his Liber Gomorrhianus, written towards 1049, where he openly attacked sodomites, since he was concerned with sodomitical intercourse among monastics and members of the church. ¹⁷ Some commentators of the Decretum made distinctions between sexual activity and marital sex, based on the first distinction established in the text between marital or good sex, as derived from the union between a married man and woman, the first example of natural law. By contrast, there was evil sex or sexual pleasure that was not part of the original creation of God since it originated after God had completed creation and because of the ancestral sin. Later, Thomas Aquinas argued that lust was a disorder that undermined reason and established a hierarchy of sins, including fornication, rape, adultery, incest, sacrilege and, the worst sin of all, the sin against nature, which could take on three forms: sloth, sodomy and bestiality.

Legal principles and practices were established, based on the theological conception we have outlined above, with their own nuances and objects. Because of the close interconnection between the spiritual and the material spheres, criminal law espoused the Church’s position on the sin of lust. The reason for this is that the Church and the Crown pursued identical aims, such as, for instance, the defence of a society constructed in accordance with orthodox religious and legal principles, where transgressions were to be punished. On numerous occasions, sin and offence would not receive parallel considerations. For example, in the case of sins against nature—sloth, masturbation, ejaculation outside the vagina, bestiality and sodomy—civil laws only criminalised some of the conducts (sodomy and bestiality) ignoring the rest, in spite their consideration as acts against nature. As Tomás y Valiente pointed out some years ago, and, recently, Iñaki Bazán Díaz, in medieval legislation the distinction between sin and offence is often blurred, sin or transgressions of the moral order did not necessarily entail transgressions of the social order or offences. In fact, sin derived from the mere intention whilst the offence required that the act be carried out.

Castilian legislation relating to sodomy first developed in the municipal sphere through the fueros (charters) granted to urban centres. Most of the articles were inspired by the Fuero Juzgo, of Visigoth tradition, ¹⁸ as is the case of the Fuero de Cuenca (1190), which served as a model for the codes of other communities that were granted the charters, spurring the wide dissemination of its penal precepts. ¹⁹ The Fuero de Cuenca, written in a scholastic clerical environment, established the death penalty for the crime of sodomy, providing even a description of this sin-offence (per anum viciavi) as well as the form of execution of the sentence, death by burning, as an act of purification, reserved not only for sodomites but also for those who insulted another by saying ‘I fucked you up the arse’ (‘ego te per anum viciavi’). ²⁰

The towns where the Cuenca Charter was established, between 1190 and the late thirteenth century, included similar dispositions for the offence of sodomy, with minor variations in the translation from Latin to Castilian, such as those of Béjar, Plasencia, Alcaraz, Alcázar and Alarcón, where ‘ego te per anum viciavi’ was translated as ‘I fucked you up the arse’ (‘yo te fodí por el culo’), ²¹ while there was an ‘error in translation’ of this passage—‘anum’, that is, ‘anus’, by ‘año’ (year)—in the charters of Úbeda, Huete and Baeza, where it was translated as ‘a whole year I did this to you’ (‘todo un anno te fiz esto’). The Fuero de Soria (1256) is somewhat different in its writing:

But it aggrieves us to mention what is not our will to observe and even less mention, for it is an evil sin! A man overcome by the devil lusts for another to commit sin against nature with him, those who do this, after being apprehended, be they castrated, once castrated be they burnt. ²²

The anonymous author/s of this code informs us of the quality and gravity of this sin, and decidedly influenced by canon law, described it as most horrible, nefarious, against nature and inspired by the Devil. In Soria Charter, the punishment against sodomites was harsher than in other charters because of the exemplary torture that the publicly castration implied as well as the subsequent dragging of the prisoners and their final execution in the bonfire. The fines for the false accusations were high. The Baeza charter established that ‘the person who accused another of committing sodomy, pay fifty thousand maravedíes and retract what he/she has been said; and if he/she has no money to pay, take him/her for one year in prision’. ²³ Even, according to the Oviedo charter (1145) and Allariz charter (1153–57), if one neighbour insulted another, calling him a sodomite, the aggrieved neighbour could hurt him or kill him without penalty. ²⁴

Punitive legislation of this type of sexual relationships was not limited to the municipalities south of the river Duero, as it is also found in the general law codes for the whole Crown. Thus, the Fuero Juzgo (c. 1241), a romanced version of the Visigoth code, the Liber Iudiciorum, granted to several towns in Andalusia and Murcia includes the penalty for sodomy. The Fuero Juzgo described sodomy as the evil offence committed by a man lying with another. The jurists who wrote the law, close to the royal Court, commented that they did so impelled by the gravity of the sin and because it was thus established in the Holy Scriptures and earthly laws, in which this new law was to be included. The code dictated that a judge must convict and order punishment for sodomites, a punishment of public shaming by castration and the seizure of properties. After this, the judge was to deliver them to the bishop to do penance in prison. In contrast to the model of the Fuero de Cuenca, the established punishment was less harsh, undoubtedly, than the death penalty, but the public shaming and the seizure of their properties entailed the social demise of the individual, his family and condemned them to marginality. Also, in this code, rape victims were excused from punishment and the spouses and heirs were spared public shaming. Additionally, it included a novelty in terms of local legislation since it extended the real jurisdiction of this crime to all social strata: ‘We establish that in this law any man, layman or clergy, or of high or low lineage who is proven to have committed this sin be sentenced to castration by the prince or the judge’. ²⁵

Legislation was tightened in the Fuero Real (c. 1255). ²⁶ It gathered several dispositions of the Fuero Juzgo and expanded them. Thus, to the punishment of castration established in the Fuero Juzgo was added the death sentence from the Fuero de Cuenca, albeit not by burning, but by hanging, in addition to the public shaming by the mutilation of sexual organs. ²⁷ Equally, it is noteworthy that the Fuero Real echoed the scholastic offensive since sexual relations between men are described as an act against nature. Contemporaries are the Charters of the Kingdom of Valencia, granted by King James I in 1251, which established the same punishment of death at the stake for the sins/crimes of heresy and sodomy. ²⁸

The next legal code against sodomy was The Partidas (1265), which determined that this was a sin of lust ‘men fall into lying with each other against nature or natural custom’. In the seventh Partida, the code devoted a part of the dispositive section to remind its readers of the Genesis episode of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in an attempt to tie this law to the sinful character of sodomitical acts. Just as God did in biblical times, now it was the king who, when imparting justice, was responsible for fulfilling the law and, therefore, had to impose an exemplary punishment to sinners and despicable people. ²⁹ If God had once severely chastised with death Sodom and Gomorrah’s dwellers, medieval royal justice could not leave unpunished the person who had committed the infamous crime, for the law established that performing sodomy acts diminished the social standing of the accused. Along with social reprobation, death was the end awaiting any man who had committed the act contra natura. ³⁰ Nonetheless, to prevent injustices, there were some few exceptions regarding particular cases. For example, people who against their free will were forced into it were acquitted and had no punishment whatsoever. Children under fourteen could not be condemned either, for the law considered minors had no judgement, and therefore they were not aware of the gravity of the act. In sum, a sodomite was a person who, in full possession of his or her faculties, freely and consciously had given in to the ‘sin’.

The punishments had a preventive purpose through a public ceremony that was supported by the pedagogy of terror. ³¹ First, it demonstrates that sodomy brings infamia (infamy) and the punishment of God is not just for the sinner but also for the whole community where the sin is committed. For this reason, any neighbour was legitimated to accuse whoever transgressed the law before the magistrates. There appears thus, for the first time in Castilian penal law, the term infamia, a vitally important concept. Nevertheless, from the middle of the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, lawmakers devoted little attention to this issue, since there are hardly any dispositions which, from a legal viewpoint, modified the rule put forward in the Partidas.

Until the year 1497, we do not find any further penalisation of sodomy in the general legal codes of the kingdom. That year, the Catholic Monarchs (Isabelle I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) reinforced the legal system condemning it by means of a Pragmática Real. ³² This new law was supported by the reference texts of the Christian community that had inspired Castilian lawmakers since the twelfth century, albeit with a greater insistence on the wrath of God, since it was a sin that brought destruction upon humankind: wars, divine wrath and pestilence. The legal codifiers therefore convened that unnatural acts shared a dual nature, they were a sin and a crime, an abominable action deserving of the worst of punishments. The sin and crime of sodomy was an attack against God, against the natural order of procreation, against social order and against the soul, in the face of which, the social model, upheld by the Church and the state, had to protect itself, as is revealed in the law of the Catholic Monarchs:

Because amongst the many other sins and crimes that offend God Our Lord, and bring dishonour to the land, crimes committed against natural order are especially conspicuous. The laws must have punishments against this abominable crime, a destroyer of the natural order punished by Divine justice, whose name it is not decent to utter. This abominable sin causes the loss of nobility and courage as well as the weakening of faith. It is abhorrent to the worship of God who, in his anger, sends pestilence and other earthly plagues and of it is born infamy and death of the people and land where it is allowed. ³³

An important aspect to highlight is the association established by the Catholic Monarchs between the nefarious crime and the crime of lese-majesty. According to the Pragmática, sodomy was a threat to the social order in that it erased the distinction between the sexes, destroyed lineages and masculine virtues and therefore caused the loss of nobility and manliness. In a trial of 1489 against Juan de Abastas, town dweller of Cisneros, the prosecutor defined sodomy as

A crime against nature, vulgarly known as sodomy, the said Juan de Abastas used as a woman and the said Pedro as male, knowing the said Pedro the said Juan de Abastas in the flesh. ³⁴

In the records, sodomy becomes identified with effeminacy in opposition to a discourse of manliness, which was a social condition demonstrated in specific social contexts, where public affirmation of the attributes associated to it was indispensable: authority, security, strength, and this was to be public knowledge, as these were the elements that constituted the social reputation of a man. ³⁵ Castilian literature of the late Middle Ages picked up the relationship between sodomy and effeminacy. For example, in El Corbacho by the archpriest of Talavera, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, written in 1438, the author complained about the men of his time:

They lament as women, they faint as females […] they pretend to make all things as women and reach to sodomitic corruption, they pursue the young men, kissing them, flattering them, giving them jewels, money and things that they like so much at their age, and thus they are pleased as if they were females, and I say no more about this corrupt matter and abominable sin. ³⁶

Hence, the Pragmática of the Catholic Monarchs affirms that the crime of sodomy was a ‘destroyer of the natural order, punished by divine judgement, bringing the loss of nobility and sapping the heart’, these being intimate values related to the concept of masculinity in the Middle Ages. The Prágmática also established the association between sodomy and heresy, which could have opened the way to the intervention of the Inquisition, although, in Castile, it remained under royal jurisdiction which meant important changes to procedure, and, for instance, the accused of sodomy knew and could confront their accusers, an impossibility in a heresy trial. ³⁷ It establishes thus a nexus between religious conscience, the authority of the kings as mediators and the common good of the population (res publica, bonum commune). ³⁸ Some decades before, the accusation of sodomy played a very important role for the propaganda against the king Enrique IV and the rights of his daughter, Juana la Beltraneja, by the party of the Isabel I. Chroniclers such as Pulgar, Valera, Palencia or Mendoza, and the Coplas (ballads), spread a homophobic image of King Henry IV, which was soon assumed by the traditional historiography. ³⁹ This campaign delegitimised the king as a male figure with a double purpose. On the one hand, a climate of social unrest was created by the incompetence of an effeminate king. On the other hand, the aim was to delegitimise Princess Juana as successor to the throne of Enrique IV, attributing his paternity to Beltrán de la Cueva, supposed lover of the royal couple. Thus, Isabel I was promoted as the legitimate successor to the Castilian crown thanks to the role played by the Coplas and chroniclers as literary and historical pamphlets that justified the restorative mission of the monarchy in the person of Isabel I. ⁴⁰

The Pragmática reserved the punishment of this sin-crime to the jurisdiction of royal justice, given its gravity. King Fernando reminded the dean and the chapter of the church of Cartagena of this in 1505, compelling them to revoke the power granted to the inquisitors of this diocese to pursue legal action against persons who had committed the ‘nefarious crime’, except in the case of clergymen defamed by this offence. King Fernando justified this decision in that the laws and decrees of the kingdom had established capital punishment for sodomites, given the gravity of the crime, and the inquisitors were barred from executing it, thus granting royal justice sole jurisdiction, save if the crime had been committed by members of the clergy. ⁴¹ The duty of the monarchs, as guarantors of the ‘common good’, consisted of repressing and punishing this atrocious crime. This was intertwined with the process of the growing power of the monarchs.

Equally, another novelty contained in the Royal Pragmática of the Catholic Monarchs in terms of previous legislation lay in that it did not exactly specify what this crime consisted of. There was mention of a sin, a crime committed against the natural order, a ‘nefarious crime’, but there is no mention of what it consisted of, whilst previous municipal and royal codes described the act in detail: ‘fuck in the arse’, ‘lie one man with another’ (charters of Úbeda, Béjar, Baeza and Law of Partidas, etc.), ‘commit adultery with a young man’. ⁴² Consequently, the codes included in the category of the sin of sodomy not only sexual intercourse but also the conducts leading to the act, whether between men or women. Hence, embracing and kissing was condemned even though no sexual act was consummated. According the different laws before fifteenth century, the punishment of sodomý was only for men. Thus, there is a notable difference between the first code of the twelfth century, where same-sex relations between women or just behaviours were not persecuted, only consummated sexual intercourse between males, considered deviances of the norm, and the later discourse derived from the civil legislation of the late Middle Ages, which was not only restricted to men but also included women, and set the role of the monarch as guarantor of the common good. Further, the Pragmática of 1497 went on to punish sexuality and sensuality in general, given the social dangerousness of deviant behaviour, since divine wrath not only befell the individuals but also the whole community. The problem was not only the sexual act but also the feeling of love between same-sex persons, whether they were men or women, since it implied a lifestyle outside social norms. For this reason, relationships between women or just some kisses and hugs became punishable for public authorities. Legislators understood that ‘sodomites’ were delinquents, disrespectful of the prevailing moral and social order, and this made them a threat to the community, and the justification for ruling the cities by the political authorities was based on the protection of the common good. In this manner, urban elites set themselves up as the representatives of the common good and the defence of the urban community. ⁴³

The Royal Pragmática of 1497 referred to a crime that, beyond infringing on the natural order, was considered a heretical act. The accusation of sodomy put a blemish on the good name and honour of the accused and could determine the credibility of the person before the rest of the society and the monarchs had to care for. The monarchs commanded all judges and officials to obligatorily comply with their letter, reminding them however it had no retroactive effect. In the pragmatic letter, the one guilty of sodomy, whether he was caught red-handed or his case was substantiated after a lengthy process, was condemned to ‘be burnt amidst flames of fire’, a purifying punishment already present in earlier legal dispositions. However, at the end of the fifteenth century, a new policy was added, the expropriation of all properties, both real estate and chattel, of the culprit. The harshness and exemplary character of this measure were complemented by the improvement and provision of greater warrants in the judicial process, whose proceedings were still left to local judges in first instance. As a token of grace, the accused could be given a copy of the names of the denouncers and their statements. This measure was probably intended to protect the accused of sodomy against defamation, for private delations could sometimes be used as a tool to ruin the good name and honour of a neighbour, such as we explain below.

The Catholic Monarchs also justified this Real Pragmática in that the punishments established in existing laws until then were insufficient to eradicate sodomy. At the end of the fifteenth century, we observe how the perception of crime against the Castilian sexual mores veered. During the final decade of the fifteenth century, legislators decided to transform individual transgressions into crimes against the community, to be punished publicly.

In the fifteenth century, political legitimacy, both in urban elites and the monarchy, was entwined with service to the common good; corporations were called upon to safeguard the common good, serving as a justification for their actions. Legislators meticulously regulated permissible behaviours in different spheres of daily life and the coexistence of neighbours. The principal administrators of social doctrines in the monarchic legislation were the urban magnates from the town councils (concejos). Local authorities, encouraged by royal legislation, saw the control of sexual conduct as the best sphere to exercise their authority, which also expressed the will to moralise, manifested collectively, that impregnated Castilian society in the late fifteenth century. This joined in the social and political discourse of the rulers with regard to the popular classes, whom they described as ugly, dirty, noxious, lustful and brutal. Equally, the crime of sodomy is described as ‘ugly, abominable, nefarious, atrocious’, a crime, they warned, could destroy the urban centre.

The municipal and royal legislation reflect the classic and theological idea that seeks the restitution of order in the community. However, in the late Middle Ages, new forms of relations between justice, legitimacy and revenge appeared. Order, political conflict, justice and punishment went hand in hand.

‘For Being a Bugger, He Is to be Burned’: Persecuting the Sodomites in the Courts of Justice

Despite the abundance of legal codes on sodomy in the crown of Castile, trials did not appear in a systematic manner until the fifteenth century during the decade of the eighties. Some authors have explained this to be due to the Real Pragmática of the Catholic Monarchs of 1497 inaugurating a new era of repression of sodomy, but this is not totally true, since there exist some cases of sodomy judged by magistrates of cities and towns, and the Chancillería de Valladolid, since at least 1486. ⁴⁴ In fact, the first trial we have documented took place many years prior, in Murcia 1408, when Alfonso Fernández Cardador was arrested by the municipal magistrates accused of having committed ‘adultery with a young man’. ⁴⁵ The ruling elites used justice and punishment to restore a supposed broken order and, thus, legitimise their government action. Similarly, revenge was linked to political conflict, so the relationship between revenge and the use of justice was at the core of the political conflict. By this way, the ruling elites used justice both to take revenge on the rivals and to legitimise themselves. The urban oligarchies employed social control of sodomy, along with other crimes of lechery, such as adultery, as a fundamental element of its discourse on the public good in the urban centres that they governed. The urban elites’ exercise of power was carried out for the ‘common good’ of the local community to legitimate the town council’s exercise of power.

The consummation of the crime of sodomy was difficult to prove because it usually took place at night and in secluded places. For this reason, legislators advocated that the kingdom needed a new law with stricter criminal procedural law techniques, introducing facilitating accusatory and evidential means, with the aim of condemning the accused more easily. As announced in the preamble of the Real Pragmática of the Catholic Monarchs of 1497, the raison d’être of this new law was ‘because the punishments extant until now are insufficient to eradicate and fully punish such abominable misdeed’. ⁴⁶

Indeed, the trial for sodomy in 1486 described above informs us how difficult it was to prove the crime of sodomy before the Real Pragmática. That same year, a trial was initiated in the town of Cisneros between Toribio Martínez, prosecutor named by the council de Cisneros, against Juan de Abastas, who was accused of having committed the ‘ugly, abominable sin of sodomy’ by having sexual intercourse with a certain Pedro in the town brickyard. Toribio Martínez first denounced him before the officials of Cisneros, in 1486, of having committed a ‘a crime against nature’, that ‘vulgarly called crime of sodomy, with the said Juan de Abastas being used as a woman and the said Pedro as a male, the said Pedro knowing the said Juan de Abastas in the flesh’, and also accused him of having committed this crime with others, both from Cisneros and other places, having thus incurred in grave punishments, as established in the charter of Cisneros and the laws of the kingdom. In several cases, the passive partner is objectified as a tool for the pleasure, which made sense by referring him as a woman. ⁴⁷ The accusation described the crime of sodomy as a crime that caused ‘angels to tremble and the corruption of the air’ and mentioned that the laws of the kingdom stipulated that all stand against such delinquents with a ‘knife of vengeance’. The first action of the judicial official of Cisneros, Diego Rasón, was to arrest Juan de Abastas and seize his properties. Juan de Abastas denied the accusation and claimed that it could not be proven. The justice of Cisneros’s mayor was unable to sentence him for lack of evidence and the case was taken by the officials of the Chancillería, whom, on the grounds of the absence of proof presented by the prosecutor, also sentenced in favour of the accused, who was duly acquitted. ⁴⁸

Sodomy, given its dual nature as crime and sin, concerned all subjects of the Crown, including those of other religions, and foreigners, since it was a crime that tainted the land where it was committed and harmed its dwellers. In 1498, the officials of the Chancillería de Valladolid judged an appeals trial that had been followed in the town of Arévalo against Yuzafe de Piedrahita, a Moor accused of engaging in sexual intercourse with another Moor, Yuce, a carpenter, during the night, and who confessed to the crime in jail, apparently without the intervention of torture. The prosecutor, Martín de Arévalo, described sodomy as a ‘grisly and horrible crime condemned by Divine and human law’ that brought famine, pestilence and other disasters unto the place where it had been committed if it went unpunished: ‘because in the land and the state thereof famine and pestilence and other evils and harm that were born of such crimes must cease’. Yuzafe presented his own defence statement. First, he had been apprehended before a formal accusation was made; second, he had been incarcerated in a ‘narrow and hard’ gaol, ignorant of the motive for his incarceration, which he understood left him in a state of defencelessness. Also, he denied the accusation of the facts and the testimony of the maestre Yuce, who had confessed to having sexual intercourse with him. Yuzafe based his defence on the lack of incriminating evidence of the prosecutor, adding that maestre Yuce was a fool, lacking in reason, who in the past ‘had acted as a madman and whose confession evidenced his feeble wit’, preventing the prosecutor, Martín de Arévalo, from basing his accusation on the confession of the carpenter Yuce. Furthermore, he adduced that, according to ‘all canon and civil law and even according to the charter law of our country’, the accused could not incriminate himself and even less accuse others of having committed the same crime. Local justice ordered he be tried by ordeal of water to make him confess his crime. The defendant decided to appeal the sentence before the judges of the Chancillería. The corregidor of the town of Arévalo did not show up in Valladolid, leading to the acquittal of Yuzafe by magistrates of the Chancillería, since he had presented a sound appeal, and they imposed perpetual silence on the prosecutor, Martín de Arévalo. ⁴⁹

Furthermore, royal justice was also concerned with foreigners who committed the crime of sodomy in the kingdom. Italy was considered the land of sodomites, and, from there, they were the foreigners accused of sodomy. ⁵⁰ In 1494, the humanist and geographer Hieronymus Münzer, who made a famous grand tour of the Iberian peninsula, said that he had seen six Italians hanging by their feet on a column outside Almeria town’s walls, guilty of the crime of sodomy:

The same day, after eating, we left the town of Almería. Outside the walls, we saw a tall column of lime, on which six Christian Italians convicted of sodomy were hanging by their feet. Those who commit crimes for this reason hang them first by the neck, as in Germany, and then by the feet; but before hanging them, they cut their genitals and tie them to the neck, because in Spain, greatly hating such a sin, and it is punished with a lot of hardness, which is very well done, for being a bestial crime and against nature. ⁵¹

In 1514, Agustín Corso, a Genoese shipmaster of a nao docked in San Sebastián, accused of committing sodomy with Antoneto, a page on his nao. Agustín Corso was apprehended and incarcerated by the town’s bailiff. During trial, the accused pleaded innocent, which led to him being subject to ordeal by fire, and, although he admitted to having kissed and embraced Antoneto, he denied having consummated sexual intercourse with the boy. Despite this, his confession and the evidence presented by witnesses were sufficient to sentence him for sodomy with the death penalty by burning. The punishment was meant to be exemplary, the sentence ordered that all his possessions be seized and the convict paraded through the town, announced by the town crier to one of the gates of San Sebastián where executions took place and that he be burned with ‘live flames of fire until he naturally dies’. ⁵²

On 20 December 1519, Anton Salomon, an Italian master of the nao Victoria, paid with his life after being accused of sodomy during the first circumnavigation of the World of Magallanes and Elcano, and he was the first man put to death in America, in the Brazilian port of Santa Luzía. Barely four months later, his lover, an Italian page called Antonio Ginovés, threw himself into the sea after being charged with ‘sometic’ as well. The process was narrated by Captain Juan Sebastián Elcano. ⁵³ The accusation served to settle accounts between general captain Fernando de Magallanes and Juan de Cartagena, overseer of the expedition. Cartagena only wanted to punish the Italians with lashes, but Magallanes, competent in administering justice at sea, disagreed with it and sentenced the master to the death penalty for strangulation and forgave the ship-boy. That incident angered the overseer, Juan de Cartagena, who was arrested for insubordination. ⁵⁴ Once again, we found that the accusation of sodomy disclosed as a weapon to assert authority.

The accusation of sodomy did not solely concern men, but also women, thus attenuating the belief in the impunity of lesbian behaviour during the Middle Ages. ⁵⁵ The punishment for lesbian women was the same as for men: capital punishment in a public place. In Seville, in 1489, Marina de Ávila and Catalina de Baena were hanged in Saint Francis square, accused of having sex with other women. ⁵⁶ Of course, sometimes, lesbian relationships were not desired and harassment occurred that was equally punished. María Alfón, a widow with two minor children in the service of the Mayor Commander of the Order of Saint James, denounced Leonor Méndez for sexual harassment on 19 August 1491 in Baeza. The description of the harassment is lively and passionate. The facts developed in the privacy of María Alfón’s house. Besides that, Leonor’s jealousy, according to Maria’s version, reached such a degree that she even threatened to kill her if ‘she left her house anywhere’. The harassment increased because they also lived very close. Thus, María Alfón accused Leonor Méndez of wanting to ‘have love against nature’ with her:

She [María] says that Leonor Mendes said that she lives in front of the house of María Alfón and that in the months of January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September and October of last year of one thousand four hundred and ninety-two, she says that the Leonor Mendes wanted to have love with Maria Alfon against nature, being both women, who told her and said many times in secret and alone that she wanted to sleep with her in a bed, and that she wanted to see her legs, lifting her skirts, and that she had wanted to kiss her many times and had insisted a lot on kissing her. ⁵⁷

The mayor of Baeza, Carlos de Moya, imposed a year of exile for Leonor Méndez and ordered her to stop the harassment, but her husband, Fernando de Tovilla, appealed the condemnatory sentence in the Royal Chancillery of Valladolid, whose judges gave him the reason because the María Alfón did not appear at the trial.

Most of the time, sex was consented by both women who could be reported anonymously, as it happened in San Sebastián in 1503. The magistrates of the Chancillería de Valladolid pronounced a sentence after a trial held against two women, accused of consummating feminine sodomy. The trial began in the town, where the judge, Miguel Ochoa de Olazábal, had apprehended, tortured and banished Catalina de Belunce, under the accusation of partaking in sexual intercourse with Mache de Oyarzun. Miguel Ochoa, after receiving information that Catalina de Belunce and Mache de Oyarzun ‘used each other as man and woman, lied on each other naked and caressed and kissed and, rode each other, on their naked bellies and committed carnal acts that should be done by a man and a woman’, and, having confirmed the facts through an enquiry, he sentenced Catalina to the gaol and tower of San Sebastián, seizing all her properties. The woman tried to defend herself adducing that the accusation false, that she was ‘honourable, with good reputation, relation and conversation’, that the witnessed lied, that the crime was not proven and that the accusation was not public knowledge in the town of San Sebastián. The judge ordered she be tried twice by ordeal of water until she confessed to her guilt, but she resisted both torments and maintained her innocence. Finally, the magistrate issued a sentence where he admitted that, in spite of not having conclusive evidence, since the crime she was accused of was very grave, he was to convict her in order to set an exemplary sentence, as this crime would bring immense torments and diseases to the town. The magistrate sentenced her to banishment and the payment of court costs. Catalina appealed against this first sentence before the tribunal of the Chancillería de Valladolid. The high Castilian court declared her not guilty in view of the lack of evidence, since the accusation had only presented witnesses and therefore the crime she was accused of was not ‘fama pública’, that is, it was not known by the neighbours of San Sebastián, acquitted her and ordered the redress of her ‘wholesome fame’. A remarkable aspect of this process, being the first testimony we conserve of the prosecution of lesbian relationships in the crown of Castile, is that nowhere in the proceedings is there any mention of the name of the offence, the crime these women were accused of, which remained hidden. ⁵⁸

Equally, after the Real Pragmática of 1497, not only were acts of sodomy punished, be they masculine or feminine, but also those similar and close to the consummation of the act. Thus, we find legal proceedings where the defendants are processed for having attempted to commit the crime of sodomy, regardless of whether the act had been consummated or whether it occurred between women. This is case of Diego Jerez Provecho, of Plasencia, whom Royal chief magistrate (Corregidor) accused of, ‘without fearing God and justice’, having tempted the young Domingo Hernández, by putting his hand in his fly, inducing him to show him his sexual organ and have intercourse with him in exchange for a meal. The judges convicted him and devised a punishment to be exemplary for all; the ritual was designed as highly charged propaganda. So, it was ordered that the accused be transported on a donkey with his hands tied and a rope around his neck and paraded through the streets to a clearing near the town walls, where he was to be tied to a pole by the neck and burnt until his body became dust. The site of the execution was a busy place, thus giving the maximum exposure to the display of the punishment. Throughout the parade through the town, the town crier was to shout: ‘This is the justice the queen our lady ordains on this man for being a bugger, she orders he is to burn whole for his crime, following the procedure started by the bailiff, Pedro de Corrales and the lawyer Sahagún’. ⁵⁹

The accusation of having committed the crime of sodomy—whether true or not—became a political weapon for the urban elites, carrying the mark of infamy for the accused. The law recognised two types of infamy: On one hand, infamy of fact, born of infamous acts or those contrary to the predominant moral order such as prostitution, perverting the course of justice, the profession of entertainers, acts against nature, and, on the other, the infamy of law, derived from a judicial sentence, legally tainting the accused for having committed adultery, sodomy, robbery, pillage, defamation, etc. Punishments that would mark an individual with infamy, those that destroyed his honour or public reputation, were death by burning or hanging, life sentence in the galleys and flogging. ⁶⁰ Infamy involved the loss of public reputation (fama pública) and honour, precluding the person from wearing silk garments, jewellery or carrying a sword, from holding certain professions or public offices and from belonging to the privilege social group, even the prohibition of marrying honourable persons, thus destroying all chances of establishing marriage alliances. Infamy meant the social demise of not only the convicts but also of their families—as a result of the social impact of the punishment of infamy—who were also branded with infamy in the eyes of the community. ⁶¹ Convictions for sodomy permanently humiliated those who suffered it with civil death. Added to this, the confiscation of property drove families to social marginality and misery. ⁶² In 1472, several neighbours of Murcia were accused of sodomy; one of them was Juan Tallante, town councillor. All of them were tortured and condemned, but the conviction was especially harsh with him, as he was member of the town council:

because the members of the town council had known that Juan Tallante had commited sodomy, which is a sin very abhorrent to God and, because this was an infamy act for the town council and for the city, they ordered and commanded that as long as Juan Tallante does not purge his sin in prison […] he would never be able to come together with them in the town hall in order to maintain their reputation. Juan Tallante had to live in exile in Valencia, where years later he was also arrested on charges of committing the sodomy again. ⁶³

A clear example of the political use of the accusation of sodomy took place in February 1494, when Bartolomé de Ávila, son of the magistrate Martín de Ávila, living in Jerez de la Frontera, was accused of engaging in sexual intercourse with another man by Juan de Robles, corregidor of the town, and by the bachiller Gil de Ávila, the town judge. ⁶⁴ The defence was taken on by his father, as the accused, being eighteen, was underaged. His father argued in his defence that the accusation was false and had been made with the ‘sole purpose of reviling the accused and denigrating the fame of Bartolomé de Ávila, his son of eighteen years’, that is, to defame him. He equally accused the corregidor of having committed several procedural irregularities, since there had been no inquiry and the plaintiff had publicly proclaimed his son’s guilt of the crime of sodomy. This irregularity in the procedure was all-important, since it was instrumental for the plaintiff that it be public knowledge that Bartolomé de Avila was arrested under the accusation of sodomy. The reason for this was that one of the essential features of medieval legal culture was not that it be oral or written but its publicity. Public reputation or public knowledge of an act was a vital strategy in the tribunals, used deliberately to sway the decision of judges. The intent of the accusation was to defame the defendant making sure these facts remained lodged in the common memory and circulated through rumour and gossip networks of Jerez de la Frontera. ⁶⁵ This was done with the purpose of composing an archive of testimonies, on which later trials could be based. In all, three months later, the trial ended before the tribunal of the Chancillería de Valladolid, where the court acquitted the defendant and ‘redressed his good fame’ on the grounds that the accusation had not been proven. ⁶⁶

There are many other examples of accusations carried out on political purposes. In the year 1511, two neighbours of Medina del Campo, Juan de Santisesteban and García Portillo, charged Bernardino de Zamora, a shoemaker, of having committed the crime of sodomy with don Juan Caballero, an important member of the urban oligarchy. ⁶⁷ The magistrate dismissed the accusation, on the grounds that he was underage, he was not twenty-five and was ‘silly, foolish and forgetful’. Two years later, Juan de Santiesteban and García Portillo were charged with having falsely accused Bernardino de Zamora of a nefarious crime and were sentenced to pay court costs and a fine of 8,000 maravedis to the royal treasury. It was thus proven that their accusation was intended to defame a rival member of the oligarchy of Medina del Campo, don Juan Caballero. To this end, they had colluded with Bernardino de Zamora; he was to incriminate himself of having committed sodomy with don Juan Caballero, to damage this important member of the town. ⁶⁸ With the intent of preventing false accusations, the Catholic Monarchs ordered the magistrates of the Royal Chancellery of Valladolid in 1498 to fine with court costs anyone who maliciously accused others, without evidence, and in the spirit of harming their opponents, doing so, as in the case of Medina del Campo, by colluding with persons from marginal sectors of society. ⁶⁹

Several accusations of sodomy were the result of political enmity. ⁷⁰ The court cases reveal that any person could be charged with sodomy as we saw earlier: Toribio Íñiguez, a cleric; Diego of Jerez, a merchant; Alonso García, a tailor; Catalina de Beluce, a woman; Antón Solomon, an Italian master; Yuçe of Piedrahíta, a muslim, and so on. ⁷¹ None was free from undergoing a legal process. However, in most instances, we find a figure we have already talked about: pages, lads, minors, whose apparent weakness was the perfect excuse to use them as victims of the ‘abominable sin’ since their will was subjugated by the desires of an older man. Details were not omitted in the effort to denigrate the accused. In 1504, Pedro Ruiz accused Alonso of Solís, from Salamanca, and he asserted:

With no fear of God and contempt for the royal justice, many days and nights during several months of the past year of 1503, he [Alonso of Solís] lay in bed with Pedro of Daroca, his page, who said that many times he cuddled and kissed him and did with him dishonest acts. And not satisfied with that, he had access to him, had carnal contact with the aforesaid Pedro of Daroca, and committed the abominable sin. ⁷²

Young boys often appear in these accusations, because they can be easily sexually exploited, as we have seen above, and manipulated for the purposes of bringing false accusations. In 1520, a cleric of Piedra Hita, Toribio Iñiguez, was accused by bachiller Cueto, visiting magistrate of the bishop of Ávila, of theft of Church property and sodomy. He confessed to committing the ‘sin against nature with others, and in particular with Alonso García, a tailor’. Immediately, the latter was incarcerated by the bailiffs of the duke of Alba and his properties seized. Alonso García adduced that the cleric Toribio Iñiguez ‘was a man with a penchant for wine’ and that he himself ‘was a good Christian, and God-fearing, with a sound conscience, with a good fame and as such was known and regarded’. Furthermore, he claimed that the witnesses presented were ‘his greatest enemies […] intent on slandering and besmirching him with such horrible sin, as they falsely and wrongfully accused him of and imputed to him’. Crown officials ordered he be tried by ordeal by water and flogging to which he consented, all the while maintaining his innocence. Finally, when the officials of Piedra Hita refused to acquit him, the case was appealed before the Real Chancillería de Valladolid, where he was acquitted, and the town authorities ordered the closure of the case and the reinstatement the confiscated properties. ⁷³

In an attempt to provide a suitable scenario for hidden and prohibited practices or maybe to reinforce the logic of the discourses regarding the crime, plaintiffs sometimes claimed that it was committed during the night, looking for the complicity of darkness, when mortals are sleeping. When the shelter of the night was inexistent, denouncers and witnesses talked about some places where the defendants hid, like the church tower, where the two men had been discovered.

The testimony given by the different witnesses tried to be as accurate as possible, so they tended to spell out the role played by each of the partners during the act, something we can find in other cases dealing with ‘same-sex’ relations.

The plaintiffs’ design had to be refuted by the defendant’s lawyers, whose strategy, when facing this kind of testimonies, was based upon their plea regarding the existence of a strong enmity between the parties: The plaintiff and the prosecutor on the one hand and the defendant on the other, as we already saw in the case of Juan Caballero and García of Portillo. The defence team strove to present reliable statements of their witnesses, something easy as far as there were always people willing to support the defendant. When after the testimonies of both parties there were grounds for reasonable doubt, the local justice issued in some cases a provisional sentence and ordered to torture the convict in order to interrogate him or her and find the truth. Water torture was employed in the case of Diego of Jerez. He was given pitchers of water. While he was tied up to the ladder, the judge asked him whether the Portillo issue was true, and he said yes. And he was asked whether the Domingo issue was true, and he confirmed it. He was then asked about the truth of Peter’s issue, and he said it was true. They asked him whether he kissed Peter and did it with him, and he said yes. After that, they removed him from the ladder. ⁷⁵

Besides the water torture, justice officials could use other coercive methods to obtain the confession of the defendant. The second torturing technique was based on the usage of fire as a dissuasive factor, and, according to the available evidence, it was a remarkably cruel torture. One of the convicts who suffered it, the Genoese Agustín Corso, admitted he had cuddled and kissed his young page. The Genoese went through the ‘fire torture, and after he talked and confessed, fire was removed. While he was tied up to the ladder, he admitted he had cuddled the aforesaid Antonete and had kissed him, but he did no more […] and that happened some other times, and he never did it’. ⁷⁶

Even though he just admitted to doing those gestures, his confession prompted justice officials to determine his acts were sodomy-leading practices and therefore was condemned to death.

In several occasions, the excessive and unjustified zeal by some officials brought about the death of the convict, thus undermining the guarantee system established by law. Therefore, it was then legitimate for the relatives of the deceased to go to the royal authority asking for justice, as Isabel of Medina, the wife of Rodrigo Linero, inhabitants of Simancas, did. She sued the town’s judges, for

having proved his husband his good reputation, the aforesaid judges subjected him to a very cruel torture. He was laid on the floor with his legs placed in the stocks, and twelve bunches of twigs were burnt near his feet and legs, causing him severe burns in his limbs. Afterwards, they made him stand on top of the embers for two hours. And on account of this torture his husband died. ⁷⁷

Royal justice had to punish the judges and all other people who committed excesses throughout the legal proceedings, as in Rodrigo Linero’s death. The Royal Chancellery judged the town judges who killed him during the fire torture. Besides the sentence to compensate the family of the deceased, they had to exile themselves for half a year and they were barred from holding a justice position in the Kingdom. This sentence, although it was reduced several times, was intended to ease the effects of the death on the family, who, even when one of the members was condemned for sodomy, was not to be tainted by such an abominable sin.

The sentence against sodomites could not even be commuted by any other penance, so, once they were condemned, they could only await death. In 1503, a king Fernando’s letter to civil authorities of towns and cities of Castile enacted that death penalty convictions were to be substituted by sending the convict to the galleys, excluded ‘those who have committed the abominable crime’. ⁷⁸ Undoubtedly, the exemplary nature of all these sentences, by means of bodily and capital punishments in public, deeply influenced the change in the social mores of urban society of medieval Castile.

Conclusion

In this essay, we have analysed some fundamental aspects of Castilian medieval society regarding the relations between sodomy and politics. First, the war against the ‘ineffable crime’ became part of the arguments supporting the common good and the government by the urban elites and the monarchy in Late Medieval Castile. Of all lustful sins, only one could bring divine wrath upon the kingdom and its population as a whole: sodomy. Hence, it was the most atrocious of lustful crimes. For this reason, the safeguard of a society from sodomites is intertwined with internal political feuds between Castilian urban elites, since the accusation of sodomy or infamy as a consequence of a conviction for this offence would cause the social destruction of the convicts and their families.

The control of the sodomy took part of the justificatory discourse of the oligarchies’ good government at the head of Castilian urban councils, who stated that they fought against the crime of sodomy in defence of the common good. The ruling elites used justice both to take revenge on the rivals and to legitimise their government actions. The changes in the legal and cultural interpretation of sodomy to emphasise communal shame as opposed to individual were reflected the way prosecutions became communal and political tools in the Castilian cities and towns at the end of the Middle Ages. The growing ideological condemnation of sodomy to increased prosecutions not as a matter of mere application of the law but rather as a shift in the cultural and political interpretation of sodomy as a means of shaping socio-political relations. Thus, sodomy lost its characterisation of strange sexual encounter between two men and acquired the social danger features that will define it until the end of the last century.