48 Facts About Spanish Inquisition

Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition, was established in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

Spanish Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism.

The Spanish Inquisition was abolished in 1834, during the reign of Isabella II, after a period of declining influence in the preceding century.

Spanish Inquisition was created through papal bull, Ad Abolendam, issued at the end of the 12th century by Pope Lucius III to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France.

The Spanish Inquisition was ill-received by the Aragonese, which led to prohibitions against insults or attacks on it.

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Spanish Inquisition is interpretable as a response to the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors.

The Spanish Inquisition prosecuted the counterfeiting of royal seals and currency, ensured the effective transmission of the orders of the kings, and verified the authenticity of official documents traveling through the kingdoms, especially from one kingdom to the other.

The Spanish Inquisition might have been part of the preparations to enforce these measures and ensure their effectiveness by rooting out false converts that would still pose a threat of foreign espionage.

So, the Spanish Inquisition would have been created as a permanent body to prevent the existence of citizens with religious sympathies with African nations now that rivalry with them had been deemed unavoidable.

The use of religion as a unifying factor across a land that was allowed to stay diverse and maintain different laws in other respects, and the creation of the Spanish Inquisition to enforce laws across it, maintain said religious unity and control the local elites were consistent with most of those teachings.

Spanish Inquisition was Machiavelli's main inspiration while writing The Prince.

The Spanish Inquisition was unique at the time because it was not led by the Pope.

Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured Pope Sixtus IV to agree to an Spanish Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome.

The Spanish Inquisition had the authority to try only those who self-identified as Christians while practicing another religion de facto.

Spanish Inquisition had been established in part to prevent conversos from engaging in Jewish practices, which, as Christians, they were supposed to have given up.

Spanish Inquisition searched for false or relapsed converts among the Moriscos, who had converted from Islam.

Lutheran was a portmanteau accusation used by the Spanish Inquisition to act against all those who acted in a way that was offensive to the church.

In general the Spanish Inquisition maintained a skeptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it as a mere superstition without any basis.

Spanish Inquisition records reveal two prosecutions in Spain and only a few more throughout the Spanish Empire.

One of the most outstanding and best-known cases in which the Spanish Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is that of Fray Luis de Leon, noted humanist and religious writer of converso origin, who was imprisoned for four years for having translated the Song of Songs directly from Hebrew.

The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index.

The Spanish Inquisition has not been known to make any serious attempt to stop this for all the books, but there are some records of them "suggesting" the King of Spain to stop collecting grimoires or magic-related ones.

Spanish Inquisition pursued offences against morals and general social order, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals.

Non-religious crimes processed by the Spanish Inquisition accounted for a considerable percentage of its total investigations and are often hard to separate in the statistics, even when documentation is available.

Beyond its role in religious affairs, the Spanish Inquisition was an institution at the service of the monarchy.

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Inquisitor General presided over the Council of the Supreme and General Spanish Inquisition, created in 1483, which was made up of six members named directly by the crown .

Familiares were lay collaborators of the Spanish Inquisition, who had to be permanently at the service of the Holy Office.

One of the most striking aspects of the organization of the Spanish Inquisition was its form of financing: devoid of its own budget, the Spanish Inquisition depended exclusively on the confiscation of the goods of the denounced.

The promise of benevolence was effective, and many voluntarily presented themselves to the Spanish Inquisition and were often encouraged to denounce others who had committed offences, informants being the Spanish Inquisition's primary source of information.

The jails of the Spanish Inquisition were no worse than those of secular authorities, and there are even certain testimonies that occasionally they were much better.

The Spanish Inquisition used it more restrictively than was common at the time.

The Spanish inquisition engaged in it far less often and with greater care than other courts.

The first Spanish Inquisition auto-da-fe did not take place until 1481 in Seville; six of the men and women subjected to this first religious ritual were later executed.

The Spanish Inquisition had limited power in Portugal, having been established in 1536 and officially lasting until 1821, although its influence was much weakened with the government of the Marquis of Pombal in the second half of the 18th century.

Since the Spanish Inquisition itself was an arm of the state, being within the Council of Castile, civil rather than ecclesiastical censorship usually prevailed.

The first texts that questioned the Spanish Inquisition and praised the ideas of Voltaire or Montesquieu appeared in 1759.

Spanish Inquisition was first abolished during the domination of Napoleon and the reign of Joseph Bonaparte .

Possibly as a result of Llorente's criticisms, the Spanish Inquisition was temporarily abolished during the three-year Liberal interlude known as the Trienio liberal, but still the old system had not yet had its last gasp.

Later, during the period known as the Ominous Decade, the Spanish Inquisition was not formally re-established, although, de facto, it returned under the so-called Congregation of the Meetings of Faith, tolerated in the dioceses by King Ferdinand.

Finally, on 15 July 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was definitively abolished by a Royal Decree signed by regent Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand VII's liberal widow, during the minority of Isabella II and with the approval of the President of the Cabinet Francisco Martinez de la Rosa.

How historians and commentators have viewed the Spanish Inquisition has changed over time and continues to be a source of controversy.

Kamen argued that the Spanish Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or as powerful as commonly believed.

Those studies showed there was an initial burst of activity against conversos suspected of relapsing into Judaism, and a mid-16th century pursuit of Protestants, but the Spanish Inquisition served principally as a forum Spaniards occasionally used to humiliate and punish people they did not like: blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners and, in Aragon, homosexuals, and horse smugglers.

Kamen went on to publish two more books in 1985 and 2006 that incorporated new findings, further supporting the view that the Spanish Inquisition was not as bad as once described by Lea and others.

In Candide by Voltaire, the Spanish Inquisition appears as the epitome of intolerance and arbitrary justice in Europe.

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In France, in the early 19th century, the epistolary novel Cornelia Bororquia, or the Victim of the Spanish Inquisition, which has been attributed to Spaniard Luiz Gutierrez, and is based on the case of Maria de Bohorquez, ferociously criticizes the Spanish Inquisition and its representatives.

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

Spanish Inquisition is a recurring trope that makes an occasional appearance in the British parliament, similar to calling something "nazi, " to reject ideas seen as religiously authoritarian.