Falso miracolo del venditore di bolle

The indulgence seller’s false miracle is a deliberately staged church spectacle that converts suspicion into mass purchase. After a village refuses to buy the indulgences, the seller and the constable manufacture a public quarrel, an accusation of fraud, and an apparent divine punishment followed by restoration. Their performance succeeds so completely that nearly everyone in the village buys a document, and news of the supposed miracle carries sales into neighboring communities. Lázaro initially believes what he sees; only afterward does he recognize the deception.

Background and Design

The seller has already tried to make his business attractive by cultivating local clergy with small gifts and adapting his manner of speech to their learning. Where persuasion fails, he resorts to what the narrative calls artful contrivances. In one village in La Sagra de Toledo, he preaches for two or three days without selling a single indulgence, and the villagers show no inclination to buy. Their refusal turns a routine sales problem into the occasion for a more elaborate scheme.

The seller decides to summon the community the following morning under the pretext of withdrawing the indulgence. That gathering is not incidental: a 1524 edict, renewed in later years, required the whole community to attend the sermons at which indulgences were presented and withdrawn. The rule guarantees the seller an audience for the staged event. His plan uses an official religious occasion to bring the villagers together, then supplies a spectacle that will make them interpret the indulgence as proof of sacred power.

The Quarrel and Public Accusation

That evening, after supper, the seller and the constable play a drinking game and begin to quarrel. The seller calls the constable a thief; the constable answers by calling him a cheat. The seller seizes a large lance, while the constable reaches for his sword. Their raised voices draw guests and villagers into the inn. People try to separate the men, who struggle to get at one another, and the argument shifts from insults to a direct accusation: the constable says that the indulgences the seller preaches are false.

The crowd prevents the two men from fighting. The villagers remove the constable to another place, while the seller remains behind, still apparently furious; after people urge him to calm down, he goes to bed. The quarrel has planted the accusation before the next day’s gathering. When the seller rings the church bells and preaches about the indulgence, villagers arrive already muttering that it is false, citing the constable’s words from the previous night. The performance must therefore do more than generate excitement: it must answer a public charge that threatens to make the documents unsaleable.

The Staged Miracle

In the middle of the sermon, the constable enters the church, says a prayer, and addresses the congregation in a composed, public voice. He claims that he and the seller had agreed to divide the profits from the indulgence sales, but that he has repented because the arrangement would harm both his conscience and the villagers’ purses. He declares the indulgences false, disavows any further part in the scheme, and throws down the staff that signifies his official authority. The gesture makes his denunciation look like a costly renunciation rather than another piece of promotion.

The seller does not have the constable expelled or silence him. Instead, he lets the accusation proceed and then falls to his knees on the pulpit, hands joined and eyes raised. His prayer asks God to expose the truth through an immediate punishment: if the constable’s charge is true, the pulpit should sink with the seller and the constable beneath the earth; if the seller is telling the truth, the constable should be punished and his malice revealed. The prayer turns the dispute into a test whose terms appear to be set not by either man but by divine judgment.

As soon as the prayer ends, the constable falls to the floor. He foams at the mouth, twists his face, kicks, punches, and convulses while the church resounds with the noise and the congregation cries out in alarm. The seller then presents the scene as grounds for pity and prayer rather than retaliation. He leads the people in supplication, approaches with a cross and holy water, and performs a long, devout oration that moves the congregation to tears. The sacred gestures and familiar language of penitence make the episode legible as a religious ritual: the apparent affliction can be understood as demonic possession, and the seller as the figure able to bring it to an end.

The seller orders the indulgence brought forward and places it on the constable’s head. The man gradually recovers his senses, throws himself at the seller’s feet, and confesses that the devil made him speak against the indulgence. His confession supplies a convenient explanation for both the earlier accusation and the bodily convulsion: he says the devil acted out of revenge for the quarrel and from distress at the good that would result if the village took the indulgence. The seller forgives him, and the two men reconcile in public.

Sales and Recognition

The crowd’s response completes the fraud. A rush to obtain the indulgence follows, and almost no one in the village is left without one: husbands and wives, sons and daughters, boys and girls all buy in the wake of the apparent miracle. The episode does not end with that congregation. News spreads to nearby villages, where people come to obtain the documents at the inn without waiting for a sermon or going to church. Across ten or twelve surrounding villages, the seller moves thousands more indulgences without preaching another sermon.

Lázaro is initially among those taken in. He says that the performance astonished him and that he believed it, as many others did. The recognition comes afterward, when he sees the seller and the constable laughing heartily over what happened. Their laughter reveals that the quarrel, denunciation, collapse, recovery, and confession were all parts of a prearranged trick. Lázaro’s shift from credulous witness to knowing observer gives the episode a second reversal: what seemed to be evidence of a miracle becomes evidence of the seller’s ingenuity.

Narrative and Religious Significance

The trick works by assigning each participant a part and letting the audience mistake the sequence for proof. The seller acts first as an aggrieved preacher and then as a merciful intercessor; the constable’s official staff, public confession, and physical collapse lend apparent weight to his changing testimony; the congregation supplies witnesses whose shared alarm confirms the event to one another. The seller does not merely assert that the indulgence is sacred. He arranges a scene in which a denunciation appears to be answered by punishment and healing, then lets the crowd’s interpretation drive the sale.

The episode belongs to the work’s sustained anticlerical satire, which depicts a religious office being used to enrich its practitioner and treats pious language as a resource that can conceal self-interest. The seller’s mercy and the constable’s confession look like devotional acts, yet both serve the commercial objective. The passage exposes that mismatch without establishing a broader doctrinal position or proving the author’s religious affiliation; the work’s authorship and intellectual origins remain uncertain. Its force lies in the sharply observed mechanism of the deception: authority, ritual, collective emotion, and the desire to witness a sign combine to turn a performance into apparent truth—and apparent truth into sales.