Medieval Inquisition

The Inquisitor, strictly speaking, was a permanent judge, acting in the name of the pope and clothed by him with the right and the duty to deal legally with offences against the Faith; he had, however, to adhere to the established rules of canonical procedure and pronounce the customary penalties.

(a) Its essential characteristic

It was providential that just at this time sprang up two new orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, whose members, by their superior theological training and were eminently fitted to perform the inquisitorial task.

The popes always upheld with earnestness the episcopal authority, and sought to free the inquisitional tribunals from every kind of arbitrariness and caprice.

It was a heavy burden of responsibility -- almost too heavy for a common mortal -- which fell upon the shoulders of an inquisitor, who was obliged, at least indirectly, to decide between life and death. The Church was bound to insist that he should possess, in a preeminent degree, the qualities of a good judge; that he should be animated with a glowing zeal for the Faith, the salvation of souls, and the extirpation of heresy.

Far from being inhuman, they were, as a rule, men of spotless character and sometimes of truly admirable sanctity, and not a few of them have been canonized by the Church.

(b) Procedure

The procedure regularly began with a month’s "term of grace", proclaimed by the inquisitor whenever he came to a heresy-ridden district. The inhabitants were summoned to appear before the inquisitor. On those who confessed of their own accord a suitable penance (e.g. a pilgrimage) was imposed, but never a severe punishment like incarceration or surrender to the civil power.

(c) The Witnesses

False witnesses were punished without mercy. One Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, relates an instance of a father falsely accusing his son of heresy. The son’s innocence quickly coming to light, the false accuser was apprehended, and sentenced to prison for life. In addition he was pilloried for five consecutive Sundays before the church during service, with bare head and bound hands. Perjury in those days was accounted an enormous offence.

(d) Punishments

Nothing suggests that the accused were imprisoned during the period of inquiry. He was compelled to promise under oath always to be ready to come before the inquisitor, and in the end to accept his sentence with good grace .

It was surely unpleasant to live under the burden of such an obligation, but it was more endurable than to await a final verdict in confinement for months or longer.

Torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth. Conscientious judges attached no great importance to confessions extracted by torture.

The hardest penalties were imprisonment in its various degrees, exclusion from the communion of the Church, and the usually consequent surrender to the civil power. Imprisonment was not always accounted punishment in the proper sense: it was rather looked on as an opportunity for repentance, a preventive against backsliding or the infection of others. Incarceration, and was inflicted for a definite time or for life. Incarceration for life was the lot of those who had failed to profit by the aforesaid term of grace, or had perhaps recanted only from fear of death, or had abjured heresy before. The most strict imprisonment implied solitary confinement, occasionally aggravated by fasting or chains.

Occasionally the popes had to put an end through their legates to atrocious conditions. After inspecting the Carcassonne and Albi prisons in 1306, the legates Pierre de la Chapelle and Béranger de Frédol dismissed the warden, removed the chains from the captives, and rescued some from their underground dungeons. The local bishop was expected to provide food from the confiscated property of the prisoner.

The Number of Victims.

(e) The Final Verdict

The ultimate decision was usually pronounced with solemn ceremonial at the sermo generalis (auto-da-fé) act of faith, as it was later called. One or two days prior to this sermo everyone concerned had the charges read to him again briefly, and in the vernacular; the evening before he was told where and when to appear to hear the verdict. The sermo, a short discourse or exhortation, began very early in the morning; then followed the swearing in of the secular officials, who were made to vow obedience to the inquisitor in all things pertaining to the suppression of heresy. Then regularly followed the so-called "decrees of mercy" (i.e. commutations, mitigations, and remission of previously imposed penalties), and finally due punishments were assigned to the guilty, after their offences had been again enumerated. This announcement began with the minor punishments, and went on to the most severe, i.e., perpetual imprisonment or death. Thereupon the guilty were turned over to the civil power, and with this act the sermo generalis closed, and the inquisitional proceedings were at an end.

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The Inquisition in Spain

At the head of the Inquisition, known as the Holy Office, stood the Grand Inquisitor, nominated by the king and confirmed by the pope. By virtue of his papal credentials he enjoyed authority to delegate his powers to other suitable persons, and to receive appeals from all Spanish courts. He was aided by a High Council (Consejo Supremo) consisting of five members -- the so-called Apostolic inquisitors, two secretaries, two relatores, one advocatus fiscalis -- and several consulters and qualificators. The officials of the supreme tribunal were appointed by the grand inquisitor after consultation with the king. The former could also freely appoint, transfer, remove from office, visit, and inspect or call to account all inquisitors and officials of the lower courts.

(4) Historical Analysis

The Reconquista was the military conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian rulers conducted from 718 to 1492 following the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Visigothic kingdom.

The height of Visigoth (western Goths or Germans) power was reached under Euric (466–84), who completed the conquest of Spain. Toledo became the new Visigothic capital, and the history of the Visigoths became essentially that of Spain.

The Moors were the medieval Muslim inhabitants of Andalusia (the Iberian peninsula including the present day Spain and Portugal).

The Portuguese Reconquista culminated in 1249, setting Portuguese borders almost to their present location. Spain’s culminated 250 years later on January 2, 1492 when Granada was surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella. This united most of what is now Spain under their rule. Navarre was not incorporated until 1512.

It is a curiosity of history that the Medieval Inquisition of the 13^th and 14^th centuries was little utilized in Spain or Portugal. It was only after the mid-fifteenth century that the Spanish Inquisition would develop, and its target would not be heretics in the traditional sense, but rather Jews who had converted to Christianity and were accused of secretly practicing their old faith.

Spain was unique in Western Europe for the diversity of its population. In addition to a large segment of Muslims, medieval Spain had the single largest Jewish community in the world, numbering some one hundred thousand souls in the 13^th Century. For centuries Jews and Christians had lived and worked together in a peaceful though generally segregated co-existence.

In the 14^th Century, anti-Jewish attitudes were on the rise throughout Europe. In 1290, England expelled its Jews and France followed in 1306. Spain began to experience an increasing anti-Jewish sentiment. It exploded in the summer of 1391 with angry anti-Jewish riots. More religious than racial – though this has been disputed – these riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. These Jewish converts would be called conversos or New Christians, to distinguish them from traditional Christian families. The converso (or the more scornful term, marrano) identity would remain with such families for generations.

The converso families were welcomed into a full participation in Spanish society not available to Jews and they would soon become leaders in government, science, business and the Church. Though it was legislated in certain areas that those forced to convert could return to their own religion, many did not. These converso families obviously faced the scorn of those who remained Jews. At the same time, however, over the years the Old Christians saw them as opportunists who secretly maintained the faith of their forefathers. It was a strong mixture of racial and religious prejudice against the conversos that would stir-up the Spanish Inquisition.

By 1492 the last remnants of the Moors was driven out of Spain. That same year Columbus discovered America, thinking had had found India. The monarchs behind Columbus and Spain’s expansion were Ferdinand and Isabella.

Isabella was a woman of the highest Christian character, Ferdinand was a hard man, more feared than loved, yet he took a divided nation of separate kingdoms and unified it, make it a world power.

This process of unification included the Spanish Inquisition. The Crown appointed the inquisitors for the purpose of ferreting out the internal enemies of the state. If they were found guilty they lost their property. The inquisitors were priests and were officially under Church discipline.

There is no doubt that the Inquisition courts would have been far harsher under a purely secular rule. Also, the courts had authority over only professed Christians; Jews and Moslems were exempt.

The targets were often converts whose motives and behavior were held as suspect.. It is well to keep in mind that heresy was viewed as a capital crime and the methods of inquisition, even in Spain, were not much different from those of other courts of the time. The Spanish courts were, in fact, more lenient that those of later Protestant witch-finders. For example, the inquisition treated witchcraft as a sign of insanity rather than heresy.

The Spanish Inquisition began under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478. Ultimately, in 1483, the pope appointed Tomás Torquemada as the Grant Inquisitor, the inquisition’s overseer.

Torquemada was born in 1420 in Valladolid (Castile), Spain. His grandmother was a converted Jew (a converso or New Christian). He was a Dominican priest and Queen Isabella’s confessor. He declined high ecclesiastical honors, choosing to remain a simple friar.

Torquemada’s idea of reform was to expel all Jews, and later all Muslims, from Spain. King Ferdinand approved of this approach. A Spanish historian of the time called Torquemada “the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order.”

At the time the purity of the Catholic faith in Spain was in danger from the numerous Marranos and Moriscos, who, for material gain, became sham converts from Judaism and Islam to Christianity respectively.

In 1490 Torquemada staged a famous show-trial involving eight Jews and conversos who were accused of having crucified a Christian child. No victim was ever identified and no body ever found; nevertheless all eight were convicted on the strength of their confessions which had been obtained through torture. They were burned at the steak.

The Marranos found a means of evading the Inquisitional tribunals in the Jews of Spain, whose riches made them very influential. As Jews they were not subject to the Inquisition. On this account Torquemada urged Ferdinand and Isabella to compel all Jews to become Christians or to leave Spain.

On March 31^st, 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella issued their Edict of Expulsion “We have decided to command all of the aforesaid Jews, men and women, to leave our kingdoms and never to return to them.”

Having accomplished the expulsion of the Jews, Torquemada retired to the monastery of St. Thomas in Avila. He died a natural death on 16 September 1498.

The purpose of the Inquisition was to root out heresy and for Torquemada that means destroying the Marranos.

Spain had more converted Jews than any other country. Some had converted by choice, many by force. But they were largely regarded with suspicion and mistrust by the Old Christians. Some were only nominally converted and continued their Jewish practices and customs in secret. These were called Judaizers.

The clergy were as much subject to the inquisition as anyone, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola included. They were called to account for their orthodoxy. The Inquisition remained a part of Spanish life for 350 years.

Modern scholarship has established beyond doubt that the litany of abuses and crimes that have made the phrase “Spanish Inquisition“ notorious was dramatically overblown by a torrent of Protestant and secularist propaganda to which the Church did not even bother to respond. Though statistics are open to dispute it is safe to say that far fewer people perished in 350 years of Inquisition than has been widely alleged, perhaps 4,000.

In Spain, where centuries had been spent fighting the Moors (followers of Islam), orthodoxy in religion became the very definition of a Spaniard. Because of the Inquisition, Spain never suffered the internal religious warfare unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. Between 1551 and 1600 the Spanish Inquisition claimed an average of four lives a year.

Isabella succeeded to the Castilian throne upon the death of her stepbrother, Henry IV. Henry had long protected both the Jews and the conversos. Upon his death, there was a widespread outbreak of anti-Jewish and anti-converso protest and violence.

Spain in the 15^th century was in the process of unifying the two traditional kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, while engaging in the final defeat of the Muslim stronghold of Granada. Isabella of Castile had married Frederick of Aragon in 1469. She came to the throne in 1474. When Ferdinand became king of Aragon in 1479, the two kingdoms were effectively united. War was waged with Moorish Granada beginning in 1482, with its final defeat coming 10 years later.

From the mid-Fifteenth Century on, religious anti-Semitism changed into ethnic anti-Semitism, with little difference seen between Jews and conversos except for the fact that conversos were regarded as worse than Jews because, as ostensible Christians, they had acquired privileges and positions that were denied to Jews. The result of this new ethnic anti-Semitism was the invocation of an inquisition to ferret out the false conversos who had, by becoming formal Christians, placed themselves under its authority.

In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull establishing an inquisition, a bull granted by Pope Sixtus IV. In 1482 the size of the inquisition was expanded and included the Dominican Friar Tomas de Torquemada, though Pope Sixtus IV protested against the activities of the inquisition in Aragon and its treatment of the conversos.

The next year, Ferdinand and Isabella established a state council to administer the inquisition with Torquemada as its president. He would later assume the title of Inquisitor-General. This was a major development as it would allow the inquisition to persist well beyond its initial intention, and to be extended to wherever Spanish power existed, including the New World. The papacy would continue to complain about the treatment of the conversos, but the unity of the Spanish Inquisition with the State would remain a distinguishing characteristic, and a primary source of post-Reformation European hatred.

Why did Ferdinand and Isabella establish the Inquisition in Spain? Ostensibly, the reason was to investigate the allegations of Judaizing among the conversos. Historians have pointed to other reasons: as a means to consolidate power, as a source of revenue from the confiscation of converso wealth, as a means to eliminate the conversos from public life, and as part of the Reconquista of a Spain united in faith.

The stated reason for the inquisition was to root out “false” conversos. There seems to have been an allure to the claim that many conversos secretly practiced their old Jewish faith. This was seen as dangerous to those of Catholic faith.

For centuries, such legends would persist in Spain, though most evidence shows that there were few “secret” Judaizers and that most conversos, particularly after the first generation of forced conversions, were faithful Catholics. This is why many historians have concluded that at the center of the inquisitorial storm was a racial, rather than a religious prejudice at work.

In March, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand ordered the expulsion – or conversion – of all remaining Jews in their joint kingdoms. The intent of the declaration was more religious than racial, as Jewish conversion rather than expulsion was certainly the intent. While many Jews fled, a large number converted, thus aggravating the popular picture of secret Judaizers within the Christian community of Spain. Up through 1530, the primary activity of the inquisition in Spain would be aimed at pursuing conversos. The same would be true from 1650 to 1720. While its activities declined thereafter, the inquisition continued to exist until its final abolition in 1824.

The Spanish Inquisition had been universally established in Spain a few years prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Records show that virtually the only “heresy” prosecuted at that time was the alleged secret practice of the Jewish faith. In all, between the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain through 1530, it is estimated that approximately 2,000 “heretics” were turned over to the secular authorities for execution. Many of those convicted of heresy were conversos who had fled. These were burned in effigy.

The most famous period of the Spanish Inquisition, under the legendary Torquemada, had little to do with the common caricature of simple “bible-believing” Protestants torn apart by ruthless churchmen. The true picture is unsettling enough: it was a government-controlled inquisition aimed at faithful Catholics of Jewish ancestry. The motivations seemed far more racial than religious, if not in Ferdinand and Isabella, then certainly among those who carried it out. The papacy, under Sixtus IV (1471-1484) and Innocent VIII (1484-1492), rather than controlling the Spanish Inquisition, protested its unfair treatment of the conversos with little result.

The image of a Spanish Inquisition burning hundreds of thousands of Protestant heretics has no basis in historical fact. There were so few Protestants in Spain that there could be no such prosecution, no matter how strong the inquisition and no matter how much anti-Catholic propagandists tried to create such an image in the 16^th Century and thereafter.

Since evidence and witnesses were gathered before the arrest, the inquisition did not see its function as a trial to determine guilt or innocence. The accused was arrested with the goal of gaining a confession. The accused was usually given adequate opportunity to admit to the wrongs after which, the prosecutor would read the charges and the accused had to respond immediately. Unlike the medieval inquisition, the accused was allowed legal counsel, though these counselors were officers of the inquisition and not terribly helpful or trusted. The accused could then muster a defense based on witness testimony or pleas of extenuating circumstances, such as drunkenness. A body called the consulta de fe, made up of inquisitors, a representative of the local bishop and theological consultors would then issue a ruling.

Those found guilty were sentenced to varying degrees of penances that could go from donning the sanbenito, a yellow penitential garb to be worn at all times in public, to servitude on a Spanish galley. As in the medieval inquisition, most cases did not involve heresy.

Charges such as bigamy, adultery, lewd living and blasphemy were the majority of cases. Only unrepentant heretics or relapsed heretics could be turned over to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake. After the bitter persecution of the conversos in the first 20 years of the inquisition, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries fewer than three people a year were executed throughout Spain. In fact, most condemned were burnt only in effigy, having previously died or fled the country.

The “auto de fe” that followed trials is the most infamous, and misunderstood, part of the Spanish Inquisition. An auto de fe was a unique aspect of the Spanish Inquisition, a public, liturgical act of faith. Usually held in a public square, an auto de fe involved prayer, a Mass, public procession of those found guilty and a reading of their sentences. The event could take the entire day and the public was encouraged to witness it.

Artistic representations of the auto de fe by propagandists usually involved images of torture and the burning of the accused. As such, they became a major source for creating the image in the popular mind of the Spanish Inquisition. However, no such activities took place during what was essential a religious act stressing the “reconciliation” of those accused with the Church. There was no torture as trials had been concluded, and if executions were to take place, they were separate from the auto de fe and conducted less publicly after the fact.

The Spanish Inquisition was unique. Wrestled early from the papacy, it was controlled by the Spanish monarchy. Its aim, certainly, was to maintain a Catholic Spain. but its use was primarily centered on Catholic conversos of Jewish and, later, Muslim ancestry. It was certainly a force that kept Protestant thought out of Spain. The number of those actually prosecuted for such activity was very small. It would persist in activities through the 17^th and 18^th centuries, though the auto de fe became less frequent. The last major outburst in activity was aimed once again at alleged Judaizing among conversos in the 1720s. It was formally ended by the monarchy in 1834, though it had effectively come to an end years prior.