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Spanish Inquisition

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: General history;
Religious disputes

   The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 by Ferdinand and
   Isabella to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and was under
   the direct control of the Spanish monarchy. It was not definitively
   abolished until 1834, during the reign of Isabel II.

   The Inquisition, as an ecclesiastical tribunal, had jurisdiction only
   over baptized Christians. However, since religious freedom did not
   exist in Spain during a large part of its history, jurisdiction of the
   Inquisition extended in practice to all the royal subjects.

Precedents

   The Inquisition was created through the papal bull Ad abolendam, issued
   at the end of the 12th century by Pope Lucius III as a way to combat
   the Albigensian heresy in southern France. There were a number of
   tribunals of the Papal Inquisition in various European kingdoms during
   the Middle Ages. In the Kingdom of Aragon, a tribunal of the Papal
   Inquisition was established by the statute of Excommunicamus of pope
   Gregory IX, in 1232, during the era of the Albigensian heresy. Its
   principal representative was Raimundo de Peñafort. With time, its
   importance was diluted, and, by the middle of the 15th century, it was
   almost forgotten although still existing in law.

   There was never a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition in Castile. Members
   of the episcopate were charged with surveillance of the faithful and
   punishment of transgressors. However, in Castile during the Middle
   Ages, little attention was paid to heresy.

Context

   The Spanish Inquisition was motivated in part by the multi-religious
   nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian
   peninsula from the Moors. Much of the Iberian peninsula was dominated
   by Moors following their invasion of the peninsula in 711 until they
   were expelled by means of a long campaign of reconquest. However, the
   reconquest did not result in the full expulsion of Muslims from Spain,
   but instead yielded a multi-religious society made up of Catholics,
   Jews and Muslims. Granada to the south, in particular remained under
   Moorish control until 1492, and large cities, especially Seville,
   Valladolid, and Barcelona, had large Jewish populations centered in
   juderias.

   The reconquest produced a relatively peaceful co-existence - although
   not without periodic conflicts - among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in
   the peninsular kingdoms. There was a long tradition of Jewish service
   to the crown of Aragon. Ferdinand's father John II named the Jewish
   Abiathar Crescas to be court astronomer. Jews occupied many important
   posts, religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi.

   Nevertheless, in some parts of Spain towards the end of the fourteenth
   century, there was a wave of anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching
   of Ferrant Martinez, archdeacon of Ecija. The pogroms of June 1391 were
   especially bloody: in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the
   synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of victims was equally
   high in other cities, such as Cordoba, Valencia and Barcelona.

   One of the consequences of these disturbances was the massive
   conversion of Jews. Before this date, conversions were rare, more
   motivated by social than religious reasons. But from the 15th century,
   a new social group appeared: conversos, also called new Christians, who
   were distrusted by Jews and Christians alike. By converting, Jews could
   not only escape eventual persecution, but also obtain entry into many
   offices and posts that were being prohibited to Jews through new, more
   severe regulations. Many conversos attained important positions in
   fifteenth century Spain. Among many others, physicians Andres Laguna
   and Francisco Lopez Villalobos (Ferdinand's Court physician), writers
   Juan del Enzina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia,
   and bankers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez (who financed the
   voyage of Christopher Colombus) were all conversos. Conversos - not
   without opposition - managed to attain high positions in the
   ecclesiastical hierarchy, at times becoming severe detractors of
   Judaism. Some even received titles of nobility, and as a result, during
   the following century some works attempted to demonstrate that
   virtually all of the nobles of Spain were descended from Jews.

Motives for instituting the Spanish Inquisition

   There is no unanimity among historians about Ferdinand and Isabella's
   motives for introducing the Inquisition into Spain. Historians have
   suggested a number of possible reasons.
    1. To establish political and religious unity. The Inquisition allowed
       the monarchy to intervene actively in religious affairs, without
       the interference of the Pope. At the same time, Ferdinand and
       Isabella's objective was the creation of an efficient state
       machinery; thus one of their priorities was to achieve religious
       unity to promote more centralized political authority.
    2. To weaken local political opposition to the Catholic Monarchs.
       Strengthening centralized political authority also entailed
       weakening local political opposition. Resistance to the
       installation of the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragon, for
       example, was often couched in terms of local legal privileges
       (fueros).
    3. To do away with the powerful converso minority. Many members of
       influential families such as the Santa Fes, the Santangels, the
       Caballerias and the Sanchezes, were prosecuted in the Kingdom of
       Aragon. This is contradicted, to an extent, by the fact that
       Ferdinand, King of Aragon, continued to employ many conversos in
       his administration.
    4. Economic support. Given that one of the measures used with those
       tried was the confiscation of property, this possibility cannot be
       discarded

Activity of the Inquisition

Beginnings

   Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican from Seville, convinced Queen Isabel of
   the existence of crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her
   stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478. A report, produced at the
   request of the monarchs by Pedro González de Mendoza, archbishop of
   Seville and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, corroborated
   this assertion. The monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to
   Castile to uncover and do away with false converts, and requested the
   Pope's assent. On November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV promulgated the bull
   Exigit sinceras devotionis affectus, through which the Inquisition was
   established in the Kingdom of Castile. The bull also gave the monarchs
   exclusive authority to name the inquisitors. The first two inquisitors,
   Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín were not named, however, until
   two years later, on September 27, 1480 in Medina del Campo.

   At first, the activity of the Inquisition was limited to the dioceses
   of Seville and Cordoba, where Alonso de Hojeda had detected the centre
   of converso activity. The first Auto de Fé was celebrated in Seville on
   February 6, 1481: six people were burned alive. The sermon was given by
   the same Alonso de Hojeda whose suspicions had given birth to the
   Inquisition. From there, the Inquisition grew rapidly in the Kingdom of
   Castile. By 1492, tribunals existed in eight Castilian cities: Ávila,
   Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo and
   Valladolid.

   Establishing the new Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragón was more
   difficult. In reality, Ferdinand did not resort to new appointments, he
   simply resuscitated the old Pontifical Inquisition, submitting it to
   his direct control. The population of Aragón was obstinately opposed to
   the Inquisition. In addition, differences between Ferdinand and Sixtus
   IV prompted the latter to promulgate a new bull categorically
   prohibiting the Inquisition's extension to Aragon. In this bull, the
   Pope unambiguously criticized the procedures of the inquisitorial
   court, affirming that,

     many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of
     enemies, rivals, slaves and other low people--and still less
     appropriate--without tests of any kind, have been locked up in
     secular prisons, tortured and condemned like relapsed heretics,
     deprived of their goods and properties, and given over to the
     secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a
     pernicious example and causing scandal to many.

   Nevertheless, pressure by Ferdinand caused the Pope to suspend this
   bull, and even promulgate another one, on October 17, 1483, naming
   Tomás de Torquemada Inquisidor General of Aragón, Valencia and
   Catalonia. With it, the Inquisition became the only institution with
   authority throughout all the kingdoms of the Spanish monarchy, and, in
   all of them, a useful mechanism at the service of the crown. However,
   the cities of Aragón continued resisting, and even saw periods of
   revolt, like in Teruel from 1484 to 1485. However, the murder of the
   inquisidor Pedro Arbués in Zaragoza on September 15, 1485, caused
   public opinion to turn against the conversos and in favour of the
   Inquisition. In Aragón, the inquisitorial courts were focused
   specifically on members of the powerful converso minority, ending their
   influence in the Aragonese administration.

   Between the years 1480 and 1530, the Inquisition saw a period of
   intense activity. Sources differ as far as the number of trials and
   executions that took place during those years. Henry Kamen risks an
   approximate number of 2,000 executed, based on the documentation of the
   Autos de Fé. Of them, the immense majority were conversos of Jewish
   origin.

Expulsion of the Jews

   Although the Jews who continued practicing their religion were not an
   object of persecution on the part of Holy Office, they were a target of
   suspicion because it was thought that they urged conversos to practice
   their former faith: in the trial at Santo Niño de la Guardia in 1491,
   two Jews and six conversos were condemned to be burned for practicing a
   supposedly blasphemous ritual.

   On March 31, 1492, scarcely three months after the reconquest concluded
   with the fall of the last Nazari Kingdom of Granada, Ferdinand and
   Isabella promulgated a decree ordering the expulsion of Jews from all
   their kingdoms. Jewish subjects were given until July 31 of the same
   year to choose between accepting baptism and leaving the country
   definitively. Although the decree allowed them to take all their
   possessions with them, land-holdings, of course, had to be sold, and
   gold, silver and coined money were forfeit. The reason given to justify
   this measure was that the proximity of unconverted Jews served as a
   reminder of their former faith and seduced many conversos into
   relapsing and returning to the practice of Judaism.

   A delegation of Jews, headed by Isaac Abravanel, offered a large sum to
   the monarchs as compensation for the revocation of the edict. It is
   believed that the Kings rejected the offer under pressure of the
   Inquisitor General. It is said that he burst into the room and threw
   thirty pieces of silver on the table, asking what would be the price
   this time to sell Jesus to the Jews. Although likely apocryphal, along
   the margins of this story one sees the influence of the Inquisition on
   the idea of the expulsion of the Jews.

   The number of the Jews that left Spain is not known, not even with an
   approximation. Historians of the period give extremely high figures (
   Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Isaac Abravanel of
   300,000). Nevertheless, current estimates significantly reduce this
   number. (Henry Kamen estimates that, of a population of approximately
   80,000 Jews, about one half or 40,000 chose emigration ). The Spanish
   Jews emigrated mainly to Portugal (where they were later expelled in
   1497) and to Morocco. Much later, the Sefardim, descendants of Spanish
   Jews, established flourishing communities in many cities of Europe,
   North Africa, and, mainly, in the Ottoman Empire.

   Those who remained enlarged the group of conversos, who were the
   principal concern of the Inquisition. Given that all the Jews who
   remained in the Kingdoms of Spain had been baptized, continuing to
   practice Judaism put them at risk of being denounced. Given that during
   the three months prior to the expulsion there were numerous
   baptisms--some 40,000 if one accepts the totals given by Kamen--one can
   logically assume that a large number of them were not sincere, but were
   simply a result of necessity to avoid the expulsion decree.

   The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted through
   1530. From 1531 through 1560, however, the percentage of conversos
   among the Inquisition trials lowered significantly, down to 3% of the
   total. There was a rebirth of persecutions when a group of crypto-Jews
   was discovered in Quintanar de la Orden in 1588; and the last decade of
   the sixteenth century saw a rise in denunciations of conversos. At the
   beginning of the 17th century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal
   began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese
   Inquisition that was founded in 1532. This translated into a rapid
   increase in the trials of crypto-Jews, among them a number of important
   financiers. In 1691, during a number of Autos de Fe in Mallorca, 36
   chuetas, or conversos of Mallorca, were burned.

   During the 18th century, the number of conversos accused by the
   Inquisition dropped significantly. The last trial of a crypto-Jew was
   of Manuel Santiago Vivar, which took place in Cordoba in 1818.

Repression of Protestants

   Conversos saw the 1516 arrival of Charles I, the new king of Spain, as
   a possible end to the Inquisition, or at least a reduction of its
   influence. Nevertheless, despite reiterated petitions from the Cortes
   of Castile and Aragon, the new monarch left the inquisitorial system
   intact.

   During the 16th century, however, the majority of trials were not
   focused on conversos. Instead, the Inquisition became an efficient
   mechanism to prune the few buds of protestantism that had begun to
   appear in Spain. Curiously, a large percentage of these Protestants
   were of Jewish origin.

   The first of these trials were those against the sect of mystics known
   as the " alumbrados" of Guadalajara and Valladolid. The trials were
   long, and ended with prison sentences of different lengths, though none
   of the sect were executed. Nevertheless, the subject of the
   "alumbrados" put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals and
   clerics who, interested in the Erasmian ideas, had strayed from
   orthodoxy (which is striking because both Charles I and Philip II of
   Spain were confessed admirers of Erasmus). Such was the case with the
   humanist Juan de Valdés, who was forced to flee to Italy to escape the
   process that had been begun against him, and the preacher, Juan de
   Ávila, who spent close to a year in prison.

   The first trials against Lutheran groups, as such, took place between
   1558 and 1562, at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, against two
   communities of Protestants from the cities of Valladolid and Seville.
   The trials signaled a notable intensification of Inquisition
   activities. A number of enormous Autos de Fe were held, some of them
   presided over by members of the royal family, and in which
   approximately one hundred were executed. After 1562, though the trials
   continued, the repression was much reduced, and it is estimated that
   only a dozen Spaniards were burned alive for Lutheranism through the
   end of the 16th century, although some 200 faced trial. The Autos de Fe
   of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism which
   was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with.

Censorship

   An image frequently misinterpreted as the Spanish Inquisition burning
   books they did not approve of. This is actually Pedro Berruguete's La
   Prueba del Fuego (1400's). It depicts a legend of St Dominic disputing
   with the Cathars: they both consign their own writings into the flames,
   and while the Cathars text burned, St Dominic's miraculously leapt from
   the flames.
   Enlarge
   An image frequently misinterpreted as the Spanish Inquisition burning
   books they did not approve of. This is actually Pedro Berruguete's La
   Prueba del Fuego (1400's). It depicts a legend of St Dominic disputing
   with the Cathars: they both consign their own writings into the flames,
   and while the Cathars text burned, St Dominic's miraculously leapt from
   the flames.

   As one manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, the Spanish
   Inquisition worked actively to impede the diffusion of heretical ideas
   in Spain by producing "Indexes" of prohibited books. Such lists of
   prohibited books were common in Europe a decade before the Inquisition
   published its first. The first Index published in Spain in 1551 was, in
   reality, a reprinting of the Index published by the University of
   Louvain in 1550, with an appendix dedicated to Spanish texts.
   Subsequent Indexes were published in 1559, 1583, 1612, 1632, and 1640.
   The Indexes included an enormous number of books of all types, though
   special attention was dedicated to religious works, and, particularly,
   vernacular translations of the Bible.

   Included in the Indexes, at one point or another, were many of the
   great works of Spanish literature. Also, a number of religious writers
   who are today considered Saints by the Catholic church saw their works
   appear in the Indexes. At first, this might seem counter-intuitive or
   even nonsensical — how were these Spanish authors published in the
   first place if their texts were only to be prohibited by the
   Inquisition and placed in the Index? The answer lies in the process of
   publication and censorship in Early Modern Spain. Books in Early Modern
   Spain faced prepublication licensing and approval (which could include
   modification) by both secular and religious authorities. However, once
   approved and published, the circulating text also faced the possibility
   of post-hoc censorship by being denounced to the Inquisition —
   sometimes decades later. Likewise, as Catholic theology evolved, once
   prohibited texts might be removed from the Index.

   At first, inclusion in the Index meant total prohibition of a text,
   however this proved not only impractical and unworkable, but also
   contrary to the goals of having a literate and well educated clergy.
   Works with one line of suspect dogma would be prohibited in their
   entirety, despite the remainder of the text's sound dogma. In time, a
   compromise solution was adopted in which trusted Inquisition officials
   blotted out words, lines or whole passages of otherwise acceptable
   texts thus allowing these expurgated editions to circulate. Although,
   in theory, the Indexes imposed enormous restrictions on the diffusion
   of culture in Spain, some historians, such as Henry Kamen argue that
   such strict control was impossible in practice and that there was much
   more liberty in this respect than is often believed. And Irving Leonard
   has conclusively demonstrated that, despite repeated Royal
   prohibitions, romances of Chivalry, such as Amadis of Gaul, found their
   way to the New World with the blessing of the Inquisition. Moreover,
   with the coming of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century,
   increasing numbers of licenses to possess and read prohibited texts
   were granted.

   Despite repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of
   censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the flowering
   of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro," although almost all of its
   major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or
   another. Among the Spanish authors included in the Index are: Gil
   Vicente, Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Enzina, Jorge de
   Montemayor, Juan de Valdés, and Lope de Vega, as well as the anonymous
   Lazarillo de Tormes and the Cancionero General, by Hernando del
   Castillo. La Celestina, which was not included in the Indexes of the
   16th, was expurgated in 1632 and prohibited in its entirety in 1790.
   Among the non-Spanish authors prohibited were Ovid, Dante, Rabelais,
   Ariosto, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Jean Bodin and Tomás Moro. One of the
   most outstanding cases — and best known — in which the Inquisition
   directly confronted literary activity is with Fray Luis de Leon, noted
   humanist and religious writer of converso origin, who was imprisoned
   for four years, (from 1572 to 1576) for having translated the Song of
   Songs directly from Hebrew.

The Inquisition and the Moriscos

   The Inquisition did not exclusively target Jewish conversos and
   Protestants. A third group suffered its rigors as well, although to a
   lesser degree. These were the moriscos, in other words, converts from
   Islam. The moriscos were concentrated above all in three zones: in the
   recently conquered kingdom of Granada, in Aragon, and in Valencia.
   Officially, all Muslims in Castile had been converted to Christianity
   in 1502; those in Aragon and Valencia were obliged to convert by
   Charles I's decree of 1526.

   Many moriscos maintained their religion in secret; although, in the
   early decades of the 16th century, an era of intense persecution of
   conversos of Jewish origin, they too were soon pursued by the
   Inquisition. There were various reasons for this: in the kingdoms of
   Valencia and Aragon, a large majority of the moriscos were under the
   jurisdiction of the nobility, persecution would have been viewed as a
   frontal assault on the economic interests of this powerful social
   class. In Granada, the principal problem was fear of rebellion in a
   particularly vulnerable region during an era when Ottoman Turks ruled
   the Mediterranean. As a result, the moriscos experienced a different
   policy, peaceful evangelization, a policy never followed with the
   Jewish converts.

   Nevertheless, in the second half of the century, late in the reign of
   Philip II, things changed. Between 1568 and 1570, the revolt of the
   Alpujarras occurred, a revolt that was suppressed with unusual
   harshness. In addition to secular penalties of execution and
   deportation of moriscos to other regions of Spain, as had previously
   occurred, the Inquisition intensified its attention to the moriscos.
   Beginning in 1570, in the tribunals of Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada,
   morisco cases became much more abundant. Beginning in the decade of
   1570, in Aragon and Valencia moriscos formed the majority of the trials
   of the Inquisition. In the tribunal of Granada itself, moriscos
   represented 82 percent of those accused between 1560 and 1571.
   Nevertheless, the moriscos did not experience the same harshness as
   Jewish ' conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital
   punishments was proportionally less.

   The permanent tension caused by the large population of Spanish
   moriscos forced the search for a more radical and definitive solution,
   and on the April 4, 1609, during the reign of Philip III, an expulsion
   order was decreed that would take place in stages, concluding in 1614,
   and during which hundreds of thousands would leave Spain. Many of those
   expelled were sincere Christians; all, of course, were baptised and
   were officially Christians. A small number of peninsular moriscos
   remained in Spain and, during the 17th century, the Inquisition pursued
   some trials against them of minor importance: according to Kamen,
   between 1615 and 1700, cases against moriscos constituted only 9
   percent of those judged by the Inquisition.

Other offenses

   Two old priests showing the application of torture under the
   supervision of the Inquisition.
   Enlarge
   Two old priests showing the application of torture under the
   supervision of the Inquisition.

   Although the Inquisition was created to halt the advance of heresy, it
   also occupied itself with a wide variety of offenses that only
   indirectly could be related to religious heterodoxy. Of a total of
   49,092 trials from the period 1560–1700 registered in the archive of
   the Suprema, appear the following: judaizantes (5,007); moriscos
   (11,311); Lutherans (3,499); alumbrados (149); superstitions (3,750);
   heretical propositions (14,319); bigamy (2,790); solicitation (1,241);
   offenses against the Holy Office of the Inquisition (3,954);
   miscellaneous (2,575).

   This data demonstrates that not only New Christians (conversos of
   Jewish or Islamic descent) and Protestants faced persecution, but also
   many Old Christians were targeted for various reasons.

   The category "superstitions" includes trials related to witchcraft. The
   witch-hunt in Spain had much less intensity than in other European
   countries (particularly France, England, and Germany). One remarkable
   case was the case of Logroño, in which the witches of Zugarramurdi in
   Navarre were persecuted. During the Auto de Fe that took place in
   Logroño on November 7 and November 8, 1610, 6 people were burned and
   another 5 burned in effigy. In general, nevertheless, the Inquisition
   maintained a skeptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft,
   considering it — in contrast to the Mediaeval Inquisitions — as a mere
   superstition without any basis. Alonso de Salazar Frias, who, after the
   trials of Logroño took the Edict of Faith to various parts of Navarre,
   noted in his report to the Suprema that, "There were no witches nor
   bewitched in the region after beginning to speak and write about them"

   Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal
   offenses, from outright blasphemy to questionable statements regarding
   religious beliefs, from issues of sexual morality, to behaviour of the
   clergy. Many were brought to trial for affirming that simple
   fornication (sex without the explicit aim of procreation) was not a sin
   or for putting in doubt different aspects of Christian faith such as
   Transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary. Also, members of the
   clergy itself were on occasion accused of heretical propositions. These
   offenses were infrequently paired with severe penalties.

   The Inquisition also pursued offenses against morals, at times in open
   conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular,
   there were numerous trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offense in
   a society that only permitted divorce under the most extreme
   circumstances. In the case of men, the penalty was five years in the
   galley (tantamount to a death sentence). Women too were accused of
   bigamy. Also, many cases of solicitation during confession were
   adjudicated, indicating a strict vigilance over the clergy.

   Inquisitorial repression of the sexual offenses of homosexuality and
   bestiality, considered, according to Canon Law, crimes against nature,
   merits separate attention. Homosexuality, known at the time as sodomy,
   was punished by death by civil authorities. It fell under the
   jurisdiction of the Inquisition only in the territories of Aragon,
   when, in 1524, Clement VII, in a papal brief, granted jurisdiction over
   sodomy to the Inquisition of Aragon, whether or not it was related to
   heresy. In Castile, cases of sodomy were not adjudicated, unless
   related to heresy. The tribunal of Zaragoza distinguished itself for
   its severity in judging these offenses: between 1571 and 1579 more than
   100 men accused of sodomy were processed and at least 36 were executed;
   in total, between 1570 and 1630 there were 534 trials and 102 executed.

   In 1815, Francisco Xavier de Mier y Campillo, the Inquisitor General of
   the Spanish Inquisition and the Bishop of Almería, suppressed
   Freemasonry and denounced the lodges as “societies which lead to
   sedition, to independence, and to all errors and crimes.” He then
   instituted a purge during which Spaniards could be arrested on the
   charge of being “suspected of Freemasonry”.

Organization

   Beyond its role in religious affairs, the Inquisition was also an
   institution at the service of the monarchy. This does not imply,
   however, that it was absolutely independent of papal authority, since
   at various points its activities depended on approval from Rome.
   Although the Inquisitor General, in charge of the Holy Office, was
   designated by the crown, his selection had to be approved by the Pope.
   The Inquisitor General was the only public office whose authority
   stretched to all the kingdoms of Spain (including the American
   viceroyalties), except for a brief period (1507-1518) during where
   there were two Inquisitor Generals, one in the kingdom of Castile, and
   the other in Aragon.

   The Inquisitor General presided over the Counsel of the Supreme and
   General Inquisition (generally abbreviated as "Counsel of the
   Suprema"), created in 1488, which was made up of six members named
   directly by the crown (the number of members of the Suprema varied over
   the course of the Inquisition's history, but it was never more than
   10). Over time, the authority of the Suprema grew at the expense of the
   power of the Inquisitor General.

   The Suprema met every morning, save for holidays, and for two hours in
   the afternoon on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The morning sessions
   were devoted to questions of faith, while the afternoons were reserved
   for cases of sodomy, bigamy, witchcraft, etc.

   Below the Suprema were the different tribunals of the Inquisition,
   which were, in their origins, itinerant, installing themselves where
   they were necessary to combat heresy, but later being established in
   fixed locations. In the first phase, numerous tribunals were
   established, but the period after 1495 saw a marked tendency towards
   centralization.

   In the kingdom of Castile, the following permanent tribunals of the
   Inquisition were established:
     * 1482 In Seville and in Cordoba.
     * 1485 In Toledo and in Llerena.
     * 1488 In Valladolid and in Murcia.
     * 1489 In Cuenca.
     * 1505 In Las Palmas ( Canary Islands).
     * 1512 In Logroño.
     * 1526 In Granada.
     * 1574 In Santiago de Compostela.

   There were only four tribunals in the kingdom of Aragon: Zaragoza and
   Valencia (1482), Barcelona (1484), and Mallorca (1488). Ferdinand the
   Catholic also established the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily (1513),
   housed in Palermo and Sardinia. In the Americas, tribunals were
   established in Lima and in Mexico (1569) and, in 1610, in Cartagena de
   Indias (present day Colombia).

Composition of the tribunals

   Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, a
   calificador, an alguacil (bailiff) and a fiscal (prosecutor); new
   positions were added as the institution matured.

   The inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians, and, in
   1608, Philip III even stipulated that all the inquisitors must have a
   background in law. The inquisitors did not typically remain in the
   position for a long time: for the court of Valencia, for example, the
   average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the
   inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests, rather than
   members of the religious orders), and had a university education. Pay
   was 60,000 maravedíes at the end of the 15th century, and 250,000
   maravedíes at the beginning of the 17th.

   The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation, investigating
   the denunciations and interrogating the witnesses. The calificadores
   were generally theologians; it fell to them to determine if the
   defendant's conduct constituted a crime against the faith. Consultants
   were expert jurists who advised the court in questions of procedure.
   The court had, in addition, three secretaries: the notario de
   secuestros (Notary of Property), who registered the goods of the
   accused at the moment of his detention; the notario del secreto (Notary
   of the Secreto), who recorded the testimony of the defendant and the
   witnesses; and the escribano general (General Notary), secretary of the
   court.

   The alguacil was the executive arm of the court: he was responsible for
   detaining and jailing the defendant. Other civil employees were the
   nuncio, ordered to spread official notices of the court, and the
   alcalde, jailer in charge of feeding the prisoners.

   In addition to the members of the court, two auxiliary figures existed
   that collaborated with the Holy Office: thefamiliares and the
   comissarios (commissioners). Familiares were lay collaborators of the
   Inquisition, who had to be permanently at the service of the Holy
   Office. To become a familiar was considered an honour, since it was a
   public recognition of limpieza de sangre — old Christian status — and
   brought with it certain additional privileges. Although many nobles
   held the position, most of the familiares many came from the ranks of
   commoners. The commissioners, on the other hand, were members of the
   religious orders who collaborated occasionally with Holy Office.

   One of the most striking aspects of the organization of the Inquisition
   was its form of financing: devoid its own budget, the Inquisition
   depended exclusively on the confiscaciones of the goods of the
   denounced. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of those
   prosecuted were rich men. That the situation was open to abuse is
   evident, as stands out in the memorial that a converso from Toledo
   directed to Charles I:

   Your Majesty must provide, before all else, that the expenses of Holy
   Office do not come from the properties of the condemned, because if
   that is the case, if they do not burn they do not eat.

Functioning of the inquisition

   The Inquisition operated in conformity with Canon Law of the Roman
   Catholic Church; its operations were in no way arbitrary. Its
   procedures were set out in various Instrucciones issued by the
   successive Inquisitor Generals, Torquemada, Deza and Valdés.

Accusation

   When the Inquisition arrived in a city, the first step was the Edict of
   Grace. Following the Sunday mass, the Inquisitor would proceed to read
   the edict: it explained possible heresies and encouraged all the
   congregation to come to the tribunals of the Inquisition to "relieve
   their consciences". They were called Edicts of Grace because all of the
   self-incriminated who presented themselves within a period of grace
   (approximately one month) were offered the possibility of
   reconciliation with the Church without severe punishment. The promise
   of benevolence was effective, and many voluntarily presented themselves
   to the Inquisition. But self-incrimination was not sufficient, one also
   had to accuse all one's accomplices. As a result, the Inquisition had
   an unending supply of informants. With time, the Edicts of Grace were
   substituted by the Edicts of Faith doing away with the possibility of
   quick, painless reconciliation.

   The denunciations were anonymous, and the defendant had no way of
   knowing the identity of his accusers. This was one of the points most
   criticized by those who opposed the Inquisition (for example, the
   Cortes of Castile, in 1518). In practice, false denunciations were
   frequent, resulting from envy or personal resentments. Many
   denunciations were for absolutely insignificant reasons. The
   Inquisition stimulated fear and distrust among neighbors, and
   denunciations among relatives were not uncommon.

Detention

   After a denunciation, the case was examined by the calificadores, who
   had to determine if there was heresy involved, followed by detention of
   the accused. In practice, however, many were detained in preventive
   custody, and many cases of lengthy incarcerations occurred--lasting up
   to two years--before the calificadores examined the case.

   Detention of the accused entailed the preventive sequestration of his
   or her property by the Inquisition. The property of the prisoner was
   used to pay for procedural expenses and the accused's own maintenance
   and costs. Often the relatives of the defendant found themselves in
   outright misery. This situation was only remedied following
   instructions written in 1561.

   The entire process was undertaken with the utmost secrecy, as much for
   the public as for the accused, who was not informed about the
   accusations that were levied against them. Months, or even years could
   pass without the accused being informed about why they were locked up.
   The prisoners remained isolated, and, during this time, the prisoner
   was not allowed to attend mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of
   the Inquisition were not worse than those of civil society, and there
   are even certain testimonies that occasionally they were much better.
   Some prisoners died in prison, as was frequent at the time.

The trial

   The inquisitorial process consisted of a series of hearings, in which
   both the denouncers and the defendant gave testimony. A defense counsel
   was assigned to the defendant--a member of the tribunal itself--whose
   role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage him or her to
   speak the truth. The prosecution was directed by the fiscal.
   Interrogation of the defendant was done in the presence of the Notary
   of the Secreto, who meticulously wrote down the words of the accused
   (the archives of the Inquisition, in relation to those of other
   judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completness of their
   documentation). In order to defend himself, the accused had two
   possibilities: abonos (to find favorable witnesses) or tachas (to
   demonstrate that the witnesses of accusors were not trustworthy).

   In order to interrogate the criminals, the Inquisition made use of
   torture, but not in a systematic way. It was applied mainly against
   those suspected of Judaism and Protestantism, beginning in the 16th
   century. For example, Lea estimates that between 1575 and 1610 the
   court of Toledo tortured approximately a third of those processed for
   heresy. In other periods, the proportions varied remarkably. Torture
   was always a means to obtain the confession of the accused, not a
   punishment itself. It was applied without distinction of sex or age,
   including children and the aged.

   The methods of torture most used by the Inquisition were garrucha, toca
   and the potro. The application of the garrucha, also known as the
   strappado, consisted of suspending the criminal from the ceiling by a
   pulley with weights tied to the ankles, with a series of lifts and
   drops, during which arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were
   sometimes dislocated.. The toca, also called tortura del agua,
   consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and
   forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had
   impression of drowning. The potro, the rack, was the instrument of
   torture used most frequently.

   The assertion that "confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum"
   (the confession was true and free) sometimes follows a description of
   how, presently after torture ended, the subject freely confessed to his
   offenses.

   Some of the torture methods attributed to the Spanish Inquisition were
   never used. For example, the " Iron Maiden" never existed in Spain, and
   was a post- Reformation invention of Germany. Thumbscrews on display in
   an English museum as Spanish were recently argued to be of English
   origin. The “Spanish Chair,” a device used to hold the victim while the
   soles of their feet were roasted, was certainly in existence in Spain
   during the period of the Inquisition. It is uncertain, however, whether
   it was in fact used.

   Once the process concluded, the inquisidores met with a representative
   of the bishop and with the consultores, experts in theology or canon
   law, which was called the consulta de fe. The case was voted and
   sentence pronounced, which had to be unanimous. In case of
   discrepancies, the Suprema had to be informed.

Sentencing

   The results of the trial could be the following:
    1. The defendant could be acquitted. In actual practice, acquittals
       were very rare.
    2. The process could be suspended, in which the defendant went free,
       although under suspicion, and with the threat that his process
       could be continued at any time. Suspension was a form of acquittal
       without admitting specifically that the accusation had been
       erroneous.
    3. The defendant could be penanced. Considered guilty, he had to
       abjure publicly his crimes (de levi if it was a misdemeanor, and de
       vehementi if the crime were serious), and was condemned to
       punishment. Among these were the sambenito, exile, fines or even
       sentence to the galleys.
    4. The defendant could be reconciled. In addition to the public
       ceremony in which the condemned was reconciled with the Catholic
       Church, more severe punishments existed, among them long sentences
       to jail or the galleys, and the confiscation of all property. Also
       physical punishments existed, such as whipping.
    5. The most serious punishment was relaxation to the secular arm, that
       implied burning at the stake. This penalty was frequently applied
       to impenitent heretics and those who had relapsed. Execution was
       public. If the condemned repented, he was garroted before his body
       was given to the flames. If not, he was burned alive.

   Frequently, cases were judged in absentia, and when the accused died
   before the trial finished, the condemned were burned in effigy.

   The distribution of the punishments varied much over time. It is
   believed that sentences of death were frequent mainly in the first
   stage of the history of the Inquisition (according to García Cárcel,
   the court of Valencia employed the death penalty in 40% of the
   processings before 1530, but later that percentage lowered to 3%).

The Autos de Fe

   If the sentence were condemnatory, this implied that the condemned had
   to participate in the ceremony of an auto de fe, that solemnized his
   return to the Church (in most cases), or punishment as an impenitent
   heretic. The autos de fe could be private (auto particular) or public
   (auto publico or auto general).

   Although initially the public autos did not have any special solemnity
   nor sought a large attendance of spectators, with time they became
   solemn ceremonies, celebrated with large public crowds, amidst a
   festive atmosphere. The auto de fe eventually became a baroque
   spectacle, with staging meticulously calculated to cause the greatest
   effect among the spectators.

   The autos were conducted in a large public space (in the largest plaza
   of the city, frequently), generally on holidays. The rituals related to
   the auto began the previous night (the "procession of the Green Cross")
   and lasted the whole day sometimes. The auto de fe frequently was taken
   to the canvas by painters: one of the better known examples is the
   painting by Francesco Rizzi held by the Prado Museum in Madrid and
   which represents the auto celebrated in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on
   June 30, 1680. The last public auto de fe took place in 1691.

Decadence of the inquisition

   The arrival of the Enlightenment in Spain slowed inquisitorial
   activity. In the first half of the 18th century, 111 were condemned to
   be burned in person, and 117 in effigy, most of them for judaizing. In
   the reign of Philip V, there were 728 autos de fe, while in the reigns
   of Charles III and Charles IV only four condemned were burned.

   With the Century of Lights, the Inquisition changed: Enlightenment
   ideas were the closest threat that had to be fought. The main figures
   of the Spanish Enlightenment were in favour of the abolition of the
   Inquisition, and many were processed by the Holy Office, among them
   Olavide, in 1776; Iriarte, in 1779; and Jovellanos, in 1796. The latter
   sent a report to Charles IV in which he indicated the inefficiency of
   the Inquisition's courts and the ignorance of those who operated them:

     friars who take [the position] only to obtain gossip and exemption
     from choir; who are ignorant of foreign languages, who only know a
     little scholastic theology...

   In its new role, the inquisición tried to accentuate its function of
   censoring publications, but found that Charles III had secularized
   censorship procedures and, on many occasions, the authorization of the
   Council of Castile hit the more intransigent position of the
   inquisition. Since the Inquisition itself was an arm of the State,
   being within the Council of Castile, it was generally civil censorship
   and not ecclesiastic that ended up prevailing. This loss of influence
   can also be explained because the foreign Enlightenment texts entered
   the Peninsula through prominent members of the nobility or government,
   influential people with whom it was very difficult to interfere. Thus,
   for example, the Encyclopedia entered Spain thanks to special licenses
   granted by the King.

   However, with the coming of the French Revolution, the Council of
   Castile, fearing that revolutionary ideas would penetrate Spain's
   borders, decided to reactivate the Holy Office that was directly
   charged with the persecution of French works. An Inquisition edict of
   December 1789, that received the full approval of Charles IV and
   Floridablanca, stated that:

     having news that several books have been scattered and promoted in
     these kingdoms... that, without being contented with the simple
     narration events of a seditious nature... seem to form a theoretical
     and practical code of independence from the legitimate powers....
     destroying in this way the political and social order... the reading
     of thirty and nine French works is prohibited, under fine...

   However, inquisitorial activity was impossible in the face of the
   information avalanche that crossed the border, seeing in 1792 that ,

     the multitude of sedititious papers... does not allow formalizing
     the files against those who introduce them...

   The fight from within against the Inquisition almost always took place
   in clandestine form. The first texts that questioned the inquisitorial
   role and praised the ideas of Voltaire or Montesquieu appeared in 1759.
   After the suspension of pre-publication censorship on the part of the
   Council of Castile in 1785, the newspaper El Censor began the
   publication of protests against the activities of the Holy Office by
   means of a rationalist critique and, even, Valentin de Foronda
   published Espíritu de los mejores diarios, a plea in favour of freedom
   of expression that was avidly read in the salons. Also, Manuel de
   Aguirre, in the same vein, wrote On Toleration in El Censor, the El
   Correo de los Ciegos and El Diario de Madrid.

End of the Inquisition

   During the reign of Charles IV and, in spite of the fears that the
   French Revolution provoked, several events took place that accentuated
   the decline of the Inquisition. In the first place, the state stopped
   being a mere social organizer and began to worry about the well-being
   of the public. As a result, it had to consider the land-holding power
   of the Church, in the señoríos and, more generally, in the accumulated
   wealth that had prevented social progress. On the other hand, the
   perennial struggle between the power of the Throne and the power of the
   Church, inclined more and more to the former, under which,
   Enlightenment thinkers found better protection for their ideas. Manuel
   Godoy and Antonio Alcala Galiano were openly hostile to an institution
   whose only role had been reduced to censorship and was the very
   embodiment of the Spanish Black Legend, internationally, and was not
   suitable to the political interests of the moment:

     The Inquisition? Its old power no longer exists: the horrible
     authority that this bloodthirsty court had exerted in other times
     was reduced... the Holy Office had come to be a species of
     commission for book censorship, nothing more...

   In fact, prohibited works circulated freely in public bookstores of
   Seville, Salamanca or Valladolid.

   The Inquisition was abolished during the domination of Napoleon and the
   reign of Joseph I (1808-1812). In 1813, the liberal deputies of the
   Cortes of Cadiz also obtained its abolition, largely as a result of the
   Holy Office's condemnation of the popular revolt against French
   invasion. But the Inquisition was reconstituted when Ferdinand VII
   recovered the throne on July 1 of 1814. It was again abolished during
   the three-year Liberal interlude known as the Trienio Liberal. Later,
   during the period known as the Ominous Decade, the Inquisition was not
   formally re-established, although, de facto, it returned under the
   so-called Meetings of Faith, tolerated in the dioceses by King
   Ferdinand. These had the dubious honour of executing the last heretic
   condemned, the school teacher Cayetano Ripoll, garroted in Valencia
   July 26 of 1826 (presumably for having taught deist principles), all
   amongst a European-wide scandal at the despotic attitude still
   prevailing in Spain.

   The Inquisition was definitively abolished July 15, 1834, by a Royal
   Decree signed by regent Maria Cristina de Borbon, during the minority
   of Isabel II and with the approval of the President of the Cabinet
   Francisco Martínez de la Rosa. (It is possible that something similar
   to the Inquisition acted during the first Carlist War, in the zones
   dominated by the carlists, since one of the government measures praised
   by Conde de Molina Carlos Maria Isidro de Borbon was the
   re-implementation of the Inquisition).

Death tolls

   The historian Hernando del Pulgar, contemporary of Ferdinand and
   Isabella, estimated that the Inquisition had burned at the stake 2,000
   people and reconciled another 15,000 by 1490 (just one decade after the
   inquisition began).

   The first quantitative estimates of the number processed and executed
   by the Spanish Inquisition were offered by Juan Antonio Llorente, who
   was the general secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801 and
   published, in 1822 in Paris his Historia critica de la Inquisición.
   According to Llorente, over the course of its history, the Inquisition
   processed a total of 341,021 people, of whom at least 10% (31,912) were
   executed. He wrote, "To calculate the number of victims of the
   Inquisition is the same as demonstrating, in practice, one of the most
   powerful and effective causes of the depopulation of Spain." The
   principal modern historian of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea,
   author of History of the Inquisition of Spain, considered that these
   totals, not based on rigorous statistics, were very exaggerated.

   Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of the
   Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National
   Historical Archive of Spain (Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the
   annual relations of all processes between 1560 and 1700. This material
   provides information about 49,092 judgements, the latter studied by
   Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras. These authors calculate that
   only 1.9% of those processed were burned at the stake.

   The archives of the Suprema only provide information surrounding the
   processes prior to 1560. To study the processes themselves, it is
   necessary to examine the archives of the local tribunals; however, the
   majority have been lost to the devastation of war, the ravages of time
   or other events. Pierre Dedieu has studied those of Toledo, where
   12,000 were judged for offenses related to heresy. Ricardo García
   Cárcel has analyzed those of the tribunal of Valencia. These authors'
   investigations find that the Inquisition was most active in the period
   between 1480 and 1530, and that during this period the percentage
   condemned to death was much more significant than in the years studied
   by Henningsen and Contreras.

   García Cárcel estimates that the total number processed by the
   Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000. Applying
   the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of
   1560-1700--about 2%--the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to
   death. Nevertheless, very probably this total should be raised keeping
   in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals
   of Toledo and Valencia, respectively. It is likely that the total would
   be between 3,000 and 5,000 executed. However, it is impossible to
   determine the precision of this total, owing to the gaps in
   documentation, unlikely that the exact number will ever be known.

Historiography

   How historians and commentators have viewed the Spanish Inquisition has
   changed over time, and continues to be a source of controversy to this
   day. Before and during the 19th century historical interest focused on
   who was being persecuted. In the early and mid 20th century historians
   examined the specifics of what happened and how it influenced Spanish
   history. In the later 20th and 21st century historians have re-examined
   how severe the Inquisition really was, calling into question some of
   the conclusions made earlier in the 20th century.

The Spanish "Black Legend"

   In the mid-16th century, coincident with the persecution of the
   Protestants, there began to appear from the pens of various European
   Protestant intellectuals, an image of the Inquisition that exaggerated
   its negative aspects for propagandistic effects. One of the first to
   write about this theme was the Englishman John Foxe (1516-1587), who
   dedicated an entire chapter of his book The Book of Martyrs to the
   Spanish Inquisition. Other sources of the black legend of the
   Inquisition were the Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes, authored
   under the pseudonym of Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus (possibly an
   allusion to German astronomer Regiomontanus), that was probably written
   by two exiled Spanish Protestants, Casiodoro de Reina and Antonio del
   Corro. The book saw great success, and was translated into English,
   French, Dutch, German and Hungarian and contributed to cementing the
   negative image that the Inquisition had in Europe. The Dutch and
   English, political rivals of Spain, also built on the black legend.

   Other sources for the black legend of the Inquisition come from Italy.
   Ferdinand's efforts to export the Spanish Inquisition to Naples
   provoked many revolts, and even as late as 1547 and 1564 there were
   anti-Spanish uprisings when it was believed that the Inquisition would
   be established. In Sicily, where the Inquisition was established, there
   were also revolts against the activity of the Holy Office, in 1511 and
   1516. Many Italian authors of the 16th century referred with horror to
   the actions of the Inquisition.

Professional historians

   Before the rise of professional historians in the 19th century, the
   Spanish Inquisition had largely been studied and portrayed by
   Protestant scholars who saw it as the archetypal symbol of Catholic
   intolerance and ecclesiastical power. The Spanish Inquisition for them
   was largely associated with the persecution of Protestants. Nineteenth
   century professional historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador
   de los Rios, were the first to challenge this perception and look
   seriously at the role of Jews and Muslims.

   At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the
   groundbreaking History of the Inquisition in Spain. This influential
   work saw the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine of immense power,
   constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression
   of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of
   progress." Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of
   operation in no uncertain terms calling it "theocratic absolutism" at
   its worst. William H. Pres-cott, the Boston historian, likened it to an
   "eye that never slumbered".

   Starting in the 1920's Jewish scholars picked up on Lea's work left
   off. Yitzhak Baer's History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Cecil
   Roth's History of the Marranos and, after World War II, the work of
   Haim Beinart who for the first time published trial transcripts of
   cases involving conversos.

Inquisition revisionism

   One of the first books to challenge the standard view was The Spanish
   Inquisition (1965) by Henry Kamen. Kamen argued that the Inquisition
   was not nearly as cruel or as powerful as commonly believed. The book
   was very influential and largely responsible for subsequent studies in
   the 1970's to try and quantify (from archival records) the
   Inquisition's activities from 1480 to 1834. Those studies showed there
   was an initial burst of activity against conversos suspected of
   relapsing into Judaism, and a mid-16th-century pursuit of Protestants -
   but the Inquisition served principally as a forum Spaniards
   occasionally used to humiliate and punish people they did not like:
   blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners and, in Aragon, homosexuals and
   horse smugglers. Kamen went on to publish two more books in 1985 and
   2006 that incorporated new findings, further supporting the view that
   the Inquisition was not as bad as once described by Lea and others.
   Along similar lines is Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988).

The Spanish Inquisition in the Arts

   The Tribunal of the Inquisition as illustrated by Francisco de Goya
   Enlarge
   The Tribunal of the Inquisition as illustrated by Francisco de Goya

Painting

   During the 17th century, various representations of the auto de fe were
   produced, like the large oil painted by Francisco Ricci that represents
   the auto de fe celebrated at the Plaza Mayor of Madrid in 1680. This
   type of painting emphasized above all the solemnity and spectacle of
   the autos.

   Criticism of the Inquisition is a constant in the work of painter
   Francisco de Goya, especially in Los Caprichos (The Whims). In this
   series of engravings, produced at the end of the eighteenth century,
   various figures penanced by the Inquisition appear, with biting legends
   underlining the frivolity of the motives in contrast to the criminal's
   expressions of anguish and desperation. A foreigner who had been judged
   as a heretic carries the legend "For having been born elsewhere." These
   engravings brought the painter problems with the Holy Office, and, to
   avoid trial, Goya presented the original engravings to Charles IV as a
   gift.

   Much later, between 1815 and 1819, Goya painted other canvases about
   the Inquisition. Most notably Auto de fe de la Inquisición (pictured).

Literature

     * The literature of the eighteenth century approaches the theme of
       the Inquisition from a critical point of view. In Candide by
       Voltaire, the Inquisition appears as the epitome of intolerance and
       arbitrary justice in Portugal and America.

     * During the Romantic period, the gothic novel, which was primarily a
       genre developed in Protestant countries, Catholicism was frequently
       associated with terror and repression. This vision of the Spanish
       Inquisition appears in, among other work, The Monk (1796) by Mattew
       Lewis (set in Madrid during the Inquisition, but can be seen as
       commenting on the French Revolution and the Terror); in Melmoth the
       Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturins and in The Manuscript
       Found in Saragossa by Polish author Jan Potocki.

     * One of the best known stories of Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the
       Pendulum, explores along the same lines the use of torture by the
       Inquisition. The types of torture that appear in the story have no
       basis in history, however.

     * In France, in the early 19th century, the epistolary novel Cornelia
       Bororquia, or the Victim of the Inquisition, which has been
       attributed to Spaniard Luiz Gutiérrez, ferociously criticizes the
       Inquisition and its representatives.

     * The Inquisition also appears in one of the chapters of the novel
       The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which imagines
       an encounter between Jesus and the Inquisitor General.

     * Small Gods, (1992) one of the Discworld Novels by Terry Pratchett
       centres around a small Country - Omnia - in which all the
       inhabitants are (nominally) followers of the "Great God Om". One of
       the ways to ensure that all Omnians follow the words of the Omnian
       prophets, is a torture body, known as the Quisition, which follows
       the more fanciful claims about torture treatment during the Spanish
       Inquisition.

     * Carme Riera's novella, published in 1994, Dins el Darrer Blau (In
       the Last Blue) is set during the repression of the chuetas
       (conversos from Mallorca) at the end of the 17th century.

     * In 1998, the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes published the historical
       novel The Heretic, about the Protestants of Valladolid and their
       repression by the Inquisition.

Film

     * Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum has been taken to the screen many
       times. Perhaps best known is the version by Roger Corman in 1961.

     * The Inquisition appears in a musical segment of Mel Brooks' movie
       History of the World, Part I (1981).

     * The film Akelarre (1984) by Pedro Olea, deals with the trial in
       Logroño of the witches of Zugarramurdi in Navarre.

     * The Inquisition captures the main character in the Polish film
       Rekopis Znaleziony w Saragossie (The Saragossa Manuscript).

Theatre and TV

     * The Grand Inquisitor of Spain plays a part in Don Carlos, (1867) a
       play by Friedrich Schiller (which was the basis for an opera in
       five acts by Giuseppe Verdi, in which the Inquisitor is also
       featured).

     * In the Monty Python comedy team's Spanish Inquisition sketch, the
       Inquisition repeatedly burst unexpectedly into scenes after someone
       would utter the words "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition",
       screaming "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!". The
       Inquisition would then use forms of " torture" like a dish-drying
       rack, soft cushions, and the comfy chair.

     * The Histeria! episode "Megalomaniacs!" featured a game show sketch
       based on the Spanish Inquisition titled "Convert or Die!" The
       sketch was later banned from the episode and replaced with a new
       sketch about Custer's Last Stand in reruns due to complaints from
       the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights that the sketch
       was teaching kids to reject Catholicism. However, it was restored
       when the episode was broadcast on In2TV.

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