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The Spanish Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) was a crown-controlled tribunal created to police the orthodoxy of converted Jews and Muslims, notorious for torture, secrecy, and the auto-da-fé. Modern scholarship counts roughly 3,000-5,000 executions over three and a half centuries — dreadful, yet far below the Black Legend's figures — and notes its courts were often milder than secular ones. Nobody expected it; everyone has heard of it.

Key facts

Established: 1478, by papal bull at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella
First and fiercest target: Conversos — converted Jews suspected of secret Judaism
Most notorious figure: Tomás de Torquemada, first Inquisitor General
Linked expulsion: The Alhambra Decree expelling Spain's Jews, 1492
Public ritual: The auto-da-fé — penance ceremony; executions followed separately
Executions: c. 3,000-5,000 over c. 350 years, per modern archival studies
Abolished: Definitively in 1834

Made by the crown

The Spanish Inquisition was created in 1478 — papal bull, royal request — as something new: a Church court controlled by the monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella rather than by Rome. Its founding problem was the aftermath of Spain’s century of anti-Jewish violence: mass conversions had created a large class of conversos, and the tribunal existed to test whether the New Christians were sincere — with torture available (as in secular courts of the age), the accused unaware of their accusers, and penalties from penance through property confiscation to relaxation “to the secular arm”: burning, alive for the unrepentant, after garrotting for the confessed. The first Inquisitor General, Tomás de Torquemada — himself, by irony often noted, of partial converso descent — presided over the fiercest early decades and pressed for the 1492 Alhambra Decree expelling Spain’s unconverted Jews outright. Later generations turned the machinery on suspected secret Muslims (moriscos), Protestants, mystics, blasphemers, bigamists — and, in its most culturally durable role, on books, via the Index and port inspections.

The auto-da-fé — “act of faith” — was the public liturgy: a mass penance ceremony of processions, sermons, and sentences, staged in plazas before crowds and sometimes royalty; executions themselves followed outside the city. Goya painted the aftermath species of the institution; the Black Legend — Protestant Europe’s propaganda picture of uniquely Spanish cruelty — painted the rest.

The audit

Modern archival scholarship (Henry Kamen’s revision above all) has resized without absolving. The tribunal’s meticulous records yield roughly 150,000 trials over three and a half centuries and executions in the range of 3,000-5,000 — concentrated in the first fanatic half-century — figures dwarfed by legend’s hundreds of thousands, and lower, proportionally, than many secular courts of the era; the Inquisition notably executed far fewer accused witches than northern Europe’s panics, its inquisitors ruling most witchcraft delusion (the Basque instruction of 1614 is an early monument of judicial scepticism). The balancing entries are heavy: the terror of secret denunciation woven through centuries of Spanish life; the racialised “purity of blood” statutes the converso obsession spawned; the expulsions; and the intellectual chill of the Index. Torture, for the record, was used in a minority of cases and under rules — which mitigates the caricature without rescuing the institution.

The long end

Enfeebled by the Enlightenment (its last execution, a schoolmaster hanged in 1826, scandalised Europe), the Inquisition was abolished and restored with Spain’s political swings until definitive dissolution in 1834. Its afterlife is double: a serious scholarly field working its extraordinary archives — and the punchline industry, from Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor to Monty Python, which guaranteed that, contrary to the sketch, everyone now expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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Sources

Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (Yale, 1997)