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(1170 – August 6, 1221) Presiding over an Auto-da-fe, by Pedro Berruguete, (1450 - 1504). The first Spanish auto de fe was held 1481, and St Dominic died in 1221.The Spanish Inquisition was an institution that had precedents in other Inquisitions.The reconquest of Spain from the Moors resulted in a relatively peaceful multi-religious society, but violent Antisemitism and Persecution of Muslims persecution ensued and many Jews and Muslims converted to the Catholicism or fled. Summary Some of these conversos were suspected of not being sincere converts. The Alhambra Decree in 1492 ordered all remaining Jews to leave the Kingdom of Spain, causing more Jews to convert to Christianity rather than depart.Various motives have been proposed for the monarchs to start the Inquisition, such as increased political authority, weakening opposition, doing away with conversos and sheer profit.

Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured Pope Sixtus IV to let him set up an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome. Sixtus IV later accused the Spanish inquisition of being overzealous, accused the monarchs of being greedy and issued a Papal bull to stop it, but he was pressured into withdrawing the bull. On both occasions Sixtus IV went along with Ferdinand. THE ROLE OF THE VATICAN IN THE ENCOUNTER, by RICHARD W. SCHULTZ

During the 16th century a new target was found: Protestants. About 100 were burned as heretics.An index of prohibited books was drawn up that were alleged to contain heresy. In time converts from Islam, called Moriscos, were also persecuted by the Holy Office.The Spanish Inquisition was an institution at the service of the monarchy, but had to follow procedures set up by the Holy See.Most of the inquisitors had a university education in law. The procedures would start with Edicts of Grace, where people were invited to step forward to confess heresy freely and to denounce others. Denunciations were followed by detentions. The defendant was assigned a defense counsel, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage him or her to speak the truth. A Notary of the Secreto meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation.

Torture was used in about two percent of the cases, and in this regard the Inquisition was rather enlightened, being much more restrained than secular courts of the time.Sentences varied from fines to execution and those condemned had to participate in the ritual of auto de fe.The arrival of the 18th century slowed inquisitorial activity and it was definitively abolished on July 15, 1834.From 1476 to 1834 probably between 3,000 and 5,000 people were executed.

From the mid-16th century to the mid-17th century, a time when Europe was torn apart by Catholic-Protestant strife, there began to appear from the pens of various European Protestant intellectuals, who generally had minimal or no direct access to or experience of the Inquisition, what has come to be known as the Black Legend, as part of the Protestant polemic in support of the Reformation. With the gradual ebbing of religious hostilities, professional historians began investigations, giving a detailed, nuanced and less exaggerated picture of the Inquisition. Precedents An 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 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 there according to the law.

There was never a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition in Kingdom of 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.

Background The Spanish Inquisition was motivated in part by the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors (Muslims). 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 centred in Juderías.

The reconquest produced a relatively peaceful co-existence - although not without periodic conflicts - among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the peninsula's kingdoms. There was a long tradition of Jewish service to the crown of Aragon. Ferdinand's father John II of Castile 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 14th 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 people killed was equally high in other cities, such as Córdoba, Spain, Valencia, Spain and Barcelona.Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition, p. 17. Kamen cites approximate numbers for Valencia (250) and Barcelona (400), but no solid data about Cordoba.

One of the consequences of these disturbances was the mass conversion of Jews. Before this date, conversions were rare and tended to be motivated more for social rather 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 for their religious beliefs. 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. But converting was a hard long process involving many crucial steps and could not be done overnight. Many conversos attained important positions in 15th century Spain. Among many others, physicians Andrés 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.Notably Bishop Pablo de Santa Maria, author of Scrutinium Scripturarum, Jeronimo de Santa Fe (Hebraomastix) and Pedro de la Caballeria (Zelus Christi contra Judaeos). All three were conversos. (Kamen, op. cit., p.39) 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.Notably the Libro verde de Aragon and Tizón de la nobleza de España (cited in Kamen, op. cit. p. 38.

Motives for instituting the Spanish Inquisition Historians differ about Ferdinand and Isabella's motives for introducing the Inquisition into Spain. A number of possible reasons have been suggested:

  • To establish political and religious homogeneity. 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.
  • 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).
  • Out of fear. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1991 (Vol XI, p.485) states that, "It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or through their correligionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain." Whether real or imagined there was a great fear among 15th Century Spaniards that they had a Fifth column living among them.From the eighth century to the seventeenth century Spain was in the front line of the Christian-Muslim struggle. In that period Spain was invaded by no less than four Islamic empires: the Ummayad, Almoravid, Almohad the last, the Marinids, tried to re-establish Muslim rule in Iberia in the 14th century (though it never was able to get beyond holding a few southern enclaves and was soon driven out). The rapid rise of the Ottoman Empire following the 1453 conquest of Europe's greatest city, Constantinople, laid the basis for the rapid expansion of that Islamic empire into Europe's southeast and made it a massive menace in the Mediterranean basin as it expanded quickly into North Africa. Barbary pirates - which were under the aegis of the Ottomans and in fact formed part of the rapidly growing naval dominance of the Ottomans in Mediterranean - caused immense havoc to Christian lands on the European side. According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by North African pirates and sold as slaves between the 16th and 17th century. These Arab slave trade were captured mainly from seaside villages in Spain, Italy and Portugal. It should be noted that the Ottoman caliphate claimed sovereignty over all lands previously under Islamic rule, which included most of Spain.
  • To do away with the powerful converso minority. Many members of influential families such as the Santa Fés, the Santangels, the Caballerias and the Sanchezes, were prosecuted in the Kingdom of Aragon. However the King of Aragon, Ferdinand, continued to employ many conversos in his administration.
  • Profit. The property of people found guilty by the Inquisition was confiscated. Sixtus IV openly accused the monarchs of this sin.


    • Activity of the Inquisition Beginnings Alonso de Hojeda (Dominican), a Dominican Order from Seville, convinced Queen Isabel of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478.The terms converso and crypto-Jew are somewhat vexed, and occasionally historians are not clear on how, precisely, they are intended to be understood. For the purpose of clarity, in this article converso will be taken to mean one who has sincerely renounced Judaism or Islam and embraced Catholicism. Crypto-Jew will be taken to mean one who accepts Christian baptism, yet continues to practice Judaism. 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. At first the request was turned down for a number of reasons. One reason was that they had requested the Spanish Inquisition to be under the control of the monarchs of Spain. This in turn would lessen papal authority over the clergy involved and make methods difficult to keep in line with official papal rules of inquisition, and instead easily become a mere political and semi-military tool of Spain. Ferdinand pressured Sixtus IV by threatening to withdraw militarily support during a time when the Turks were a major threat to Rome. On November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV published 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 (Dominican) had detected the centre of converso activity. The first auto de fe 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, Spain, Jaén, Spain, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo, Spain 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.Cited in Kamen, op. cit., p. 53.

    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 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.

    The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530. Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and executions in this period; Henry Kamen estimates about 2,000 executed, based on the documentation of the Autos de Fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin.He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin. (Kamen, op. cit., p. 60)

    The number of Jews who left Spain is not even approximately known. Historians of the period give extremely high figures: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Isaac Abravanel of 300,000. Modern estimates are much lower: Henry Kamen estimates that, of a population of approximately 80,000 Jews, about one half or 40,000 chose emigration Kamen, op. cit., pp. 29-31.. The Spanish Jews emigrated mainly to Portugal (from where they were 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.

    Many Jews were baptised in the three months before the deadline for expulsion, some 40,000 if one accepts the totals given by Kamen: probably most were to avoid expulsion, rather than a sincere change of faith. These conversos were the principal concern of the Inquisition; continuing to practice Judaism put them at risk of denunciation and trial.

    The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, however, the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped 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 there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the 16th century. 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, founded in 1532. This led to 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 decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Cordoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.

    Repression of Protestants Conversos saw the 1516 arrival of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 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 Crown of Castile and Aragon, the new monarch left the inquisitorial system intact.The Cortes of Castile asked the king to reform the inquisitorial process no fewer than four times, in 1518, 1520, 1523 and 1525. The Cortes of Aragon at least in 1518. (Kamen, The Inquisition: An Historical Revision, pp. 78-81).

    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. A large percentage of these Protestants were of Jewish origin.

    Depite much popular myth about the Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain. About 100 persons in Spain were found to be Protestants and turned over to the secular authorities for execution in the 1560s and in the last decades of the century, an additional 200 Spaniards were accused of being followers of Luther. “Most of them were in no sense Protestants...Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as ‘Lutheran.’ Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy.”Kamen p. 98

    The first of these trials were those against the sect of mysticism known as the "Alumbrados" of Guadalajara (province) and Valladolid. The trials were long, and ended with prison sentences of differing 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.These trials, specifically those of Valladolid, form the basis of the plot of "The Heritic: A novel of the Inquisition" by Miguel Delibes (Overlook: 2006) The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition's activities. A number of enormous Autos de Fe were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family.Kamen, (op. cit. p. 99) gives the figure of about 100 executions between 1559 and 1566. He compares these figures with those condemned to death in other European countries during the same period, concluding that in similar periods England, under Mary I of England, executed about twice as many for heresy: in France, three times the number, and ten times as many in the Low Countries. 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 by the end of the 16th century, although some 200 faced trial.Kamen, op. cit., pp. 99-100. 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 's La Prueba del Fuego (1400s). It depicts a legend of St Dominic's dispute with the Cathars: they both consign their writings into the flames, and while the Cathars' text burn, St Dominic's miraculously leaps 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 18th 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: 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 century, 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 Thomas More, known in Spain as Tomás Moro. One of the most outstanding cases, and best known, in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is with Fray Luis de León, 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, but also the moriscos, converts to Catholicism from Islam. The moriscos were mostly concentrated in the recently conquered kingdom of Granada, in Aragon, and in Valencia (autonomous community). Officially, all Muslims in Crown of 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 continued to practice Islam in secret. Initially they were not severely persecuted, but experienced a policy of peaceful evangelization, a policy never followed with Jewish converts. 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 and 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.

    In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, things changed. The 1568-1570 Morisco Revolt in Granada was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition intensified its attention to the moriscos. From 1570 morisco cases became predominant in the tribunals of Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada; in the tribunal of Granada, between 1560 and 1571, 82% of those accused were moriscos. Kamen, op. cit. p. 217 Nevertheless, the moriscos did not experience the same harshness as Jewish ' conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.

    On the 4th of April 1609, during the reign of Philip III of Spain a staged expulsion to conclude in 1614 was decreed. Hundreds of thousands of converts from Islam to Catholicism were expelled, some of them probably sincere Christians. An indeterminate number of moriscos remained in Spain or managed to return 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 Although the Inquisition was created to halt the advance of heresy, it also occupied itself with a wide variety of offences 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); offences 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 that 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.These trials are the theme of the film Akelarre, by the Spanish director Pedro Olea. In general, nevertheless, the Inquisition maintained a sceptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it 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". Cited in Kamen, op. cit., p. 264.

    Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal offences, 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 Blessed Virgin Mary. Also, members of the clergy itself were occasionally accused of heretical propositions. These offences rarely lead to severe penalties.

    The Inquisition also pursued offences against morals, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular, there were numerous trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offence 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 offences 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 Christian heresy. In Castile, cases of sodomy were not adjudicated, unless related to Christian heresy. The tribunal of Zaragoza distinguished itself for its severity in judging these offences: 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 executions.Kamen, op. cit., p. 259.

    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.”William R. Denslow, Harry S. Truman: 10,000 Famous Freemasons, ISBN 1-4179-7579-2 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. The Inquisitor General, in charge of the Holy Office, was designated by the crown. 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 Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition (generally abbreviated as "Council of the Suprema"), created in 1483, 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 Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The morning sessions were devoted to questions of faith, while the afternoons were reserved for cases of sodomy, bigamy, witchcraft, etc. García Cárcel, Ricardo: La Inquisición, p. 21.

    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:



    There were only four tribunals in the kingdom of Aragon: Zaragoza and Valencia (autonomous community) (1482), Barcelona (1484), and Mallorca (1488). Kamen, op. cit., p. 141. Ferdinand the Catholic also established the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily (1513), housed in Palermo and Sardinia.In Sicily, the Inquisition functioned until March 30, 1782, when it was abolished by King Ferdinand IV. It is estimated that 200 people were executed during this period. In the Americas, tribunals were established in Lima and in Mexico City (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 of Spain 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 (autonomous community), for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. García Cárcel, Ricardo, op.cit., p. 24. 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 century.

    The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation, investigating thedenunciations 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: the familiares 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 the 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, Spain directed to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor:

    Your Majesty must provide, before all else, that the expenses of the 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. Cited in Kamen, op. cit., p. 151.

    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 Inquisitors General, 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.Though over the course of the trial, their identities likely became apparent. 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 neighbours, 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."In the tribunal of Valladolid, in 1699, various suspects (including a girl of 9 and a boy of 14) were jailed for up to two years with having had the least evaluation of the accusations presented against them" (Kamen, op. cit., p. 180)

    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 were 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 prisoners were not allowed to attend mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of the Inquisition were no 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 comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation. In order to defend himself, the accused had two possibilities: abonos (to find favourable witnesses) or tachas (to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers were not trustworthy).

    In order to interrogate the criminals, the Inquisition infrequently 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. The Spanish Inquisition did use torture, as did all European tribunals of the time, but did so much less often. Madden, Thomas F. The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition Crisis Magazine October 1, 2003 Contemporary historians have determined that torture was implemented in only two percent of the cases, was restricted to a period of no more than 15 minutes, and was only used a second time in one percent of the cases, never a third time. Madden, Thomas F. The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition Crisis Magazine October 1, 2003 The prisons of the inquisition were regarded as preferable and less cruel than the secular or episcopal prisons, even to the degree that there are records of prisoners blaspheming or making a request in order to be transferred to the inquisition's prisons. Madden, Thomas F. The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition Crisis Magazine October 1, 2003Haliczer, Stephen Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834 p. 71 Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1990.

    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.Sabatini, Rafael, Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History, p.190, Kessinger Publishing (2003), ISBN 0-7661-3161-0. 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.Scott, George Ryley, The History of Torture Throughout the Ages, p.172, Columbia University Press (2003) ISBN 0-7103-0837-X The potro, the rack (torture), was the instrument of torture used most frequently.Carrol. James, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History , p. 356, Houghton Mifflin Books (2002), ISBN 0-618-21908-0

    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. by Peters, Edward, Inquisition, Dissent, Heterodoxy and the Medieval Inquisitional Office, p.65, University of California Press (1989), ISBN 0-520-06630-8

    Some of the torture methods attributed to the Spanish Inquisition were never used. For example, the "Iron Maiden (torture device)" 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 England origin.

    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:

  • The defendant could be acquitted. In actual practice, acquittals were very rare.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 (autonomous community) employed the death penalty in 40% of the processings before 1530, but later that percentage lowered to 3%). García Cárcel, op. cit., p. 39

    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.

    Decline of the inquisition The arrival of the Age of 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 of Spain, there were 728 autos de fe, while in the reigns of Charles III of Spain and Charles IV of Spain 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; Tomás de Iriarte y Oropesa, 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 position only to obtain gossip and exemption from c (1170 – August 6, 1221) Presiding over an Auto-da-fe, by Pedro Berruguete, (1450 - 1504). The first Spanish auto de fe was held 1481, and St Dominic died in 1221.The Spanish Inquisition was an institution that had precedents in other Inquisitions.The reconquest of Spain from the Moors resulted in a relatively peaceful multi-religious society, but violent Antisemitism and Persecution of Muslims persecution ensued and many Jews and Muslims converted to the Catholicism or fled. Summary Some of these conversos were suspected of not being sincere converts. The Alhambra Decree in 1492 ordered all remaining Jews to leave the Kingdom of Spain, causing more Jews to convert to Christianity rather than depart.Various motives have been proposed for the monarchs to start the Inquisition, such as increased political authority, weakening opposition, doing away with conversos and sheer profit.

    Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured Pope Sixtus IV to let him set up an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome. Sixtus IV later accused the Spanish inquisition of being overzealous, accused the monarchs of being greedy and issued a Papal bull to stop it, but he was pressured into withdrawing the bull. On both occasions Sixtus IV went along with Ferdinand. THE ROLE OF THE VATICAN IN THE ENCOUNTER, by RICHARD W. SCHULTZ

    During the 16th century a new target was found: Protestants. About 100 were burned as heretics.An index of prohibited books was drawn up that were alleged to contain heresy. In time converts from Islam, called Moriscos, were also persecuted by the Holy Office.The Spanish Inquisition was an institution at the service of the monarchy, but had to follow procedures set up by the Holy See.Most of the inquisitors had a university education in law. The procedures would start with Edicts of Grace, where people were invited to step forward to confess heresy freely and to denounce others. Denunciations were followed by detentions. The defendant was assigned a defense counsel, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage him or her to speak the truth. A Notary of the Secreto meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation.

    Torture was used in about two percent of the cases, and in this regard the Inquisition was rather enlightened, being much more restrained than secular courts of the time.Sentences varied from fines to execution and those condemned had to participate in the ritual of auto de fe.The arrival of the 18th century slowed inquisitorial activity and it was definitively abolished on July 15, 1834.From 1476 to 1834 probably between 3,000 and 5,000 people were executed.

    From the mid-16th century to the mid-17th century, a time when Europe was torn apart by Catholic-Protestant strife, there began to appear from the pens of various European Protestant intellectuals, who generally had minimal or no direct access to or experience of the Inquisition, what has come to be known as the Black Legend, as part of the Protestant polemic in support of the Reformation. With the gradual ebbing of religious hostilities, professional historians began investigations, giving a detailed, nuanced and less exaggerated picture of the Inquisition. Precedents An 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 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 there according to the law.

    There was never a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition in Kingdom of 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.

    Background The Spanish Inquisition was motivated in part by the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors (Muslims). 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 centred in Juderías.

    The reconquest produced a relatively peaceful co-existence - although not without periodic conflicts - among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the peninsula's kingdoms. There was a long tradition of Jewish service to the crown of Aragon. Ferdinand's father John II of Castile 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 14th 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 people killed was equally high in other cities, such as Córdoba, Spain, Valencia, Spain and Barcelona.Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition, p. 17. Kamen cites approximate numbers for Valencia (250) and Barcelona (400), but no solid data about Cordoba.

    One of the consequences of these disturbances was the mass conversion of Jews. Before this date, conversions were rare and tended to be motivated more for social rather 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 for their religious beliefs. 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. But converting was a hard long process involving many crucial steps and could not be done overnight. Many conversos attained important positions in 15th century Spain. Among many others, physicians Andrés 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.Notably Bishop Pablo de Santa Maria, author of Scrutinium Scripturarum, Jeronimo de Santa Fe (Hebraomastix) and Pedro de la Caballeria (Zelus Christi contra Judaeos). All three were conversos. (Kamen, op. cit., p.39) 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.Notably the Libro verde de Aragon and Tizón de la nobleza de España (cited in Kamen, op. cit. p. 38.

    Motives for instituting the Spanish Inquisition Historians differ about Ferdinand and Isabella's motives for introducing the Inquisition into Spain. A number of possible reasons have been suggested:

  • To establish political and religious homogeneity. 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.
  • 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).
  • Out of fear. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1991 (Vol XI, p.485) states that, "It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or through their correligionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain." Whether real or imagined there was a great fear among 15th Century Spaniards that they had a Fifth column living among them.From the eighth century to the seventeenth century Spain was in the front line of the Christian-Muslim struggle. In that period Spain was invaded by no less than four Islamic empires: the Ummayad, Almoravid, Almohad the last, the Marinids, tried to re-establish Muslim rule in Iberia in the 14th century (though it never was able to get beyond holding a few southern enclaves and was soon driven out). The rapid rise of the Ottoman Empire following the 1453 conquest of Europe's greatest city, Constantinople, laid the basis for the rapid expansion of that Islamic empire into Europe's southeast and made it a massive menace in the Mediterranean basin as it expanded quickly into North Africa. Barbary pirates - which were under the aegis of the Ottomans and in fact formed part of the rapidly growing naval dominance of the Ottomans in Mediterranean - caused immense havoc to Christian lands on the European side. According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by North African pirates and sold as slaves between the 16th and 17th century. These Arab slave trade were captured mainly from seaside villages in Spain, Italy and Portugal. It should be noted that the Ottoman caliphate claimed sovereignty over all lands previously under Islamic rule, which included most of Spain.
  • To do away with the powerful converso minority. Many members of influential families such as the Santa Fés, the Santangels, the Caballerias and the Sanchezes, were prosecuted in the Kingdom of Aragon. However the King of Aragon, Ferdinand, continued to employ many conversos in his administration.
  • Profit. The property of people found guilty by the Inquisition was confiscated. Sixtus IV openly accused the monarchs of this sin.


    • Activity of the Inquisition Beginnings Alonso de Hojeda (Dominican), a Dominican Order from Seville, convinced Queen Isabel of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478.The terms converso and crypto-Jew are somewhat vexed, and occasionally historians are not clear on how, precisely, they are intended to be understood. For the purpose of clarity, in this article converso will be taken to mean one who has sincerely renounced Judaism or Islam and embraced Catholicism. Crypto-Jew will be taken to mean one who accepts Christian baptism, yet continues to practice Judaism. 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. At first the request was turned down for a number of reasons. One reason was that they had requested the Spanish Inquisition to be under the control of the monarchs of Spain. This in turn would lessen papal authority over the clergy involved and make methods difficult to keep in line with official papal rules of inquisition, and instead easily become a mere political and semi-military tool of Spain. Ferdinand pressured Sixtus IV by threatening to withdraw militarily support during a time when the Turks were a major threat to Rome. On November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV published 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 (Dominican) had detected the centre of converso activity. The first auto de fe 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, Spain, Jaén, Spain, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo, Spain 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.Cited in Kamen, op. cit., p. 53.

    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 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.

    The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530. Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and executions in this period; Henry Kamen estimates about 2,000 executed, based on the documentation of the Autos de Fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin.He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin. (Kamen, op. cit., p. 60)

    The number of Jews who left Spain is not even approximately known. Historians of the period give extremely high figures: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Isaac Abravanel of 300,000. Modern estimates are much lower: Henry Kamen estimates that, of a population of approximately 80,000 Jews, about one half or 40,000 chose emigration Kamen, op. cit., pp. 29-31.. The Spanish Jews emigrated mainly to Portugal (from where they were 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.

    Many Jews were baptised in the three months before the deadline for expulsion, some 40,000 if one accepts the totals given by Kamen: probably most were to avoid expulsion, rather than a sincere change of faith. These conversos were the principal concern of the Inquisition; continuing to practice Judaism put them at risk of denunciation and trial.

    The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, however, the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped 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 there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the 16th century. 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, founded in 1532. This led to 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 decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Cordoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.

    Repression of Protestants Conversos saw the 1516 arrival of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 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 Crown of Castile and Aragon, the new monarch left the inquisitorial system intact.The Cortes of Castile asked the king to reform the inquisitorial process no fewer than four times, in 1518, 1520, 1523 and 1525. The Cortes of Aragon at least in 1518. (Kamen, The Inquisition: An Historical Revision, pp. 78-81).

    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. A large percentage of these Protestants were of Jewish origin.

    Depite much popular myth about the Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain. About 100 persons in Spain were found to be Protestants and turned over to the secular authorities for execution in the 1560s and in the last decades of the century, an additional 200 Spaniards were accused of being followers of Luther. “Most of them were in no sense Protestants...Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as ‘Lutheran.’ Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy.”Kamen p. 98

    The first of these trials were those against the sect of mysticism known as the "Alumbrados" of Guadalajara (province) and Valladolid. The trials were long, and ended with prison sentences of differing 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.These trials, specifically those of Valladolid, form the basis of the plot of "The Heritic: A novel of the Inquisition" by Miguel Delibes (Overlook: 2006) The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition's activities. A number of enormous Autos de Fe were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family.Kamen, (op. cit. p. 99) gives the figure of about 100 executions between 1559 and 1566. He compares these figures with those condemned to death in other European countries during the same period, concluding that in similar periods England, under Mary I of England, executed about twice as many for heresy: in France, three times the number, and ten times as many in the Low Countries. 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 by the end of the 16th century, although some 200 faced trial.Kamen, op. cit., pp. 99-100. 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 's La Prueba del Fuego (1400s). It depicts a legend of St Dominic's dispute with the Cathars: they both consign their writings into the flames, and while the Cathars' text burn, St Dominic's miraculously leaps 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 18th 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: 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 century, 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 Thomas More, known in Spain as Tomás Moro. One of the most outstanding cases, and best known, in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is with Fray Luis de León, 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, but also the moriscos, converts to Catholicism from Islam. The moriscos were mostly concentrated in the recently conquered kingdom of Granada, in Aragon, and in Valencia (autonomous community). Officially, all Muslims in Crown of 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 continued to practice Islam in secret. Initially they were not severely persecuted, but experienced a policy of peaceful evangelization, a policy never followed with Jewish converts. 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 and 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.

    In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, things changed. The 1568-1570 Morisco Revolt in Granada was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition intensified its attention to the moriscos. From 1570 morisco cases became predominant in the tribunals of Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada; in the tribunal of Granada, between 1560 and 1571, 82% of those accused were moriscos. Kamen, op. cit. p. 217 Nevertheless, the moriscos did not experience the same harshness as Jewish ' conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.

    On the 4th of April 1609, during the reign of Philip III of Spain a staged expulsion to conclude in 1614 was decreed. Hundreds of thousands of converts from Islam to Catholicism were expelled, some of them probably sincere Christians. An indeterminate number of moriscos remained in Spain or managed to return 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 Although the Inquisition was created to halt the advance of heresy, it also occupied itself with a wide variety of offences 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); offences 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 that 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.These trials are the theme of the film Akelarre, by the Spanish director Pedro Olea. In general, nevertheless, the Inquisition maintained a sceptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it 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". Cited in Kamen, op. cit., p. 264.

    Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal offences, 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 Blessed Virgin Mary. Also, members of the clergy itself were occasionally accused of heretical propositions. These offences rarely lead to severe penalties.

    The Inquisition also pursued offences against morals, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular, there were numerous trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offence 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 offences 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 Christian heresy. In Castile, cases of sodomy were not adjudicated, unless related to Christian heresy. The tribunal of Zaragoza distinguished itself for its severity in judging these offences: 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 executions.Kamen, op. cit., p. 259.

    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.”William R. Denslow, Harry S. Truman: 10,000 Famous Freemasons, ISBN 1-4179-7579-2 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. The Inquisitor General, in charge of the Holy Office, was designated by the crown. 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 Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition (generally abbreviated as "Council of the Suprema"), created in 1483, 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 Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The morning sessions were devoted to questions of faith, while the afternoons were reserved for cases of sodomy, bigamy, witchcraft, etc. García Cárcel, Ricardo: La Inquisición, p. 21.

    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:



    There were only four tribunals in the kingdom of Aragon: Zaragoza and Valencia (autonomous community) (1482), Barcelona (1484), and Mallorca (1488). Kamen, op. cit., p. 141. Ferdinand the Catholic also established the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily (1513), housed in Palermo and Sardinia.In Sicily, the Inquisition functioned until March 30, 1782, when it was abolished by King Ferdinand IV. It is estimated that 200 people were executed during this period. In the Americas, tribunals were established in Lima and in Mexico City (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 of Spain 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 (autonomous community), for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. García Cárcel, Ricardo, op.cit., p. 24. 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 century.

    The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation, investigating thedenunciations 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: the familiares 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 the 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, Spain directed to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor:

    Your Majesty must provide, before all else, that the expenses of the 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. Cited in Kamen, op. cit., p. 151.

    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 Inquisitors General, 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.Though over the course of the trial, their identities likely became apparent. 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 neighbours, 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."In the tribunal of Valladolid, in 1699, various suspects (including a girl of 9 and a boy of 14) were jailed for up to two years with having had the least evaluation of the accusations presented against them" (Kamen, op. cit., p. 180)

    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 were 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 prisoners were not allowed to attend mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of the Inquisition were no 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 comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation. In order to defend himself, the accused had two possibilities: abonos (to find favourable witnesses) or tachas (to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers were not trustworthy).

    In order to interrogate the criminals, the Inquisition infrequently 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. The Spanish Inquisition did use torture, as did all European tribunals of the time, but did so much less often. Madden, Thomas F. The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition Crisis Magazine October 1, 2003 Contemporary historians have determined that torture was implemented in only two percent of the cases, was restricted to a period of no more than 15 minutes, and was only used a second time in one percent of the cases, never a third time. Madden, Thomas F. The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition Crisis Magazine October 1, 2003 The prisons of the inquisition were regarded as preferable and less cruel than the secular or episcopal prisons, even to the degree that there are records of prisoners blaspheming or making a request in order to be transferred to the inquisition's prisons. Madden, Thomas F. The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition Crisis Magazine October 1, 2003Haliczer, Stephen Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834 p. 71 Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1990.

    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.Sabatini, Rafael, Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History, p.190, Kessinger Publishing (2003), ISBN 0-7661-3161-0. 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.Scott, George Ryley, The History of Torture Throughout the Ages, p.172, Columbia University Press (2003) ISBN 0-7103-0837-X The potro, the rack (torture), was the instrument of torture used most frequently.Carrol. James, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History , p. 356, Houghton Mifflin Books (2002), ISBN 0-618-21908-0

    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. by Peters, Edward, Inquisition, Dissent, Heterodoxy and the Medieval Inquisitional Office, p.65, University of California Press (1989), ISBN 0-520-06630-8

    Some of the torture methods attributed to the Spanish Inquisition were never used. For example, the "Iron Maiden (torture device)" 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 England origin.

    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:

  • The defendant could be acquitted. In actual practice, acquittals were very rare.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 (autonomous community) employed the death penalty in 40% of the processings before 1530, but later that percentage lowered to 3%). García Cárcel, op. cit., p. 39

    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.

    Decline of the inquisition The arrival of the Age of 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 of Spain, there were 728 autos de fe, while in the reigns of Charles III of Spain and Charles IV of Spain 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; Tomás de Iriarte y Oropesa, 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 position only to obtain gossip and exemption from c

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