Spanish Inquisition

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (Spanish: Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición) was established in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. It began toward the end of the Reconquista and aimed to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under papal control. Along with the Roman Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition, it became the most substantive of the three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition.
According to some modern estimates, around 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offences during the three-century duration of the Spanish Inquisition, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed, approximately 2.7 percent of all cases. The Inquisition, however, which expanded to include lands under the Spanish Crown in the Americas, did not include the indigenous. The King of Spain ordered "that the inquisitors should never proceed against the Indians, but against the old Christians and their descendants and other persons against whom in these kingdoms of Spain it is customary to proceed".
The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism. The regulation of the faith of newly converted Catholics was intensified following royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1502 ordering Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave Castile, or face death, resulting in hundreds of thousands of forced conversions, torture and executions, the persecution of conversos and moriscos, and the mass expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Spain. The Inquisition was abolished in 1834, during the reign of Isabella II, after a period of declining influence in the preceding century.
The Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 312. Having been severely persecuted under previous emperors, the new religion now felt capable of commencing its program of persecution. From the moment it was recognised and empowered, there were persecutions against the adherents of other cults — pagans, Jews, and heretics. Though only in the fourth century of its existence, Christianity had spread widely and was already beginning to experience a multiplicity of schisms within itself. Among the most significant of the heresies at this time were Arianism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, the Adamites, the Donatists, the Pelagians, and Priscillianists.
The Edict of Thessalonica issued on 27 February 380 by Emperor Theodosius I established Nicene Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire. It condemned other Christian creeds as heresies of "foolish madmen" and approved their punishment. In 438, under Emperor Theodosius II, the Codex Theodosianus (Theodosian Code), a compilation of laws of the Roman Empire, already provided for the confiscation of property and the death penalty for heretics.
The Spanish ascetic and theologian Priscillian was excommunicated in 380 after being accused of magic and libertinage. In response to the instigation of two Christian bishops, Emperor Magnus Maximus condemned Priscillian and his companions to death, though prominent figures such as Saint Martin of Tours and Saint Ambrose challenged this verdict. Priscillian has been described as the first martyr killed by a Spanish Inquisition.
After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, there followed almost seven centuries in which persecutions for heresy became very rare. Some of the old heresies survived, but in a weakened state, and they tended not to operate openly. No new schisms appeared to emerge during this period.
The Episcopal Inquisition was created through the papal bull Ad Abolendam ("To abolish") at the end of the 12th century by Pope Lucius III, with the support of emperor Frederick I, to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France. Heretics were to be handed over to secular authorities for punishment, have their property seized, and face excommunication. Holders of public office, counts, barons, and rectors in cities and other places were required to take responsibility for punishing heretics handed over to them by the Church; any authority who failed in this duty was to be excommunicated, removed from office, and stripped of all legal rights. Commercial boycotts would be imposed on cities that supported heretics and declined to participate. It was the start of a centralization process in the fight against heresy. There were a large 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 et anathematisamus of Pope Gregory IX, in 1231, during the era of the Albigensian heresy, as a condition for peace with Aragon. The Inquisition was ill-received by the Aragonese, which led to prohibitions against insults or attacks on it. Rome was particularly concerned that the Iberian Peninsula's large Muslim and Jewish population would have a 'heretical' influence on Catholic citizens. Rome pressed the kingdoms to accept the Papal Inquisition after Aragon. Navarra conceded in the 13th century and Portugal by the end of the 14th, though its 'Roman Inquisition' was famously inactive. Castile refused steadily, trusting in its prominent position in Europe and its military power to keep the Pope's interventionism in check. England and Castile were the only Western European kingdoms that withstood the establishment of the Inquisition in their realms by the end of the Middle Ages. England’s success was because of its distance and the voluntary compliance of its people, while Castile, which would later become part of Spain, resisted because of its people’s resistance and the power of the kingdom.
Within the context of medieval Europe, there are several hypotheses of what prompted the creation of the tribunal after centuries of tolerance.
The 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 Reconquista did not result in the total expulsion of Muslims from Spain since they, along with Jews, were tolerated by the ruling Christian elite. Large cities, especially Seville, Valladolid, and Barcelona, had significant Jewish populations centered on Juderia, but in the coming years, the Muslims became increasingly alienated and relegated from power centers.
Cultural historian Américo Castro has characterized post-reconquest medieval Spain as a society of relatively peaceful co-existence (convivencia) punctuated by occasional conflict among the ruling Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. As historian Henry Kamen notes, the "so-called convivencia was always a relationship between unequals." Despite their legal inequality, there was a long tradition of Jewish service to the Crown of Aragon, and Jews occupied many important posts, both religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi. Ferdinand's father, John II, named the Jewish Abiathar Crescas Court Astronomer.
Antisemitic attitudes increased throughout Europe during the late 13th century and into the 14th century. England and France expelled their Jewish populations in 1290 and 1306, respectively. During the Reconquista, Spain's anti-Jewish sentiment steadily increased. This prejudice climaxed in the summer of 1391 when violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in Spanish cities such as Barcelona and Valencia, killing thousands of Jews. To linguistically distinguish the Jews from non-converted or long-established Catholic families, new converts were called conversos, or New Catholics.
According to Don Hasdai Crescas, persecution against Jews began in earnest in Seville in 1391, on the 1st day of the lunar month Tammuz (June). From there, the violence spread to Córdoba, and by the 17th day of the same lunar month, it had reached Toledo (called then by Jews after its Arabic name "Ṭulayṭulah") in the region of Castile. Then the violence spread to Mallorca, and by the 1st day of the lunar month Elul, it had also reached the Jews of Barcelona in Catalonia, where the slain was approximately two-hundred and fifty. Indeed, many Jews who resided in the neighboring provinces of Lleida and Gironda and the kingdom of Valencia had also been affected, as were the Jews of Al-Andalus (Andalucía). While many died a martyr's death, others converted to save themselves.
Encouraged by the preaching of Ferrand Martínez, Archdeacon of Ecija, the general unrest affected nearly all the Jews in Spain, during which an estimated 200,000 Jews changed their religion or else concealed their religion, becoming known in Hebrew as Anusim, meaning "those who are compelled [to hide their religion]." Only a handful of the more principal persons of the Jewish community, those who had found refuge among the viceroys in the outlying towns and districts, managed to escape.
Forced baptism was contrary to the law of the Catholic Church and, theoretically, anybody who had been forcibly baptized could legally return to Judaism. Legal definitions of the time theoretically acknowledged that a forced baptism was not a valid sacrament but confined this to cases where it was administered by physical force: a person who had consented to baptism under threat of death or serious injury was still regarded as a voluntary convert, and accordingly forbidden to revert to Judaism. After the public violence, many of the converts "felt it safer to remain in their new religion." Thus, after 1391, a new social group appeared and was referred to as conversos or New Christians. Many conversos, now freed from the anti-Semitic restrictions imposed on Jewish employment, attained important positions in fifteenth-century Spain, including positions in the government and the Church. Among many others, physicians Andrés Laguna and Francisco López de Villalobos (Ferdinand's court physician), writers Juan del Encina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera, and Alonso de Palencia, and bankers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez (who financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus) were all conversos. Conversos—not without opposition—managed to attain high positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, at times becoming severe detractors of Judaism. Some even received titles of nobility and, as a result, during the following century, some works attempted to demonstrate many nobles of Spain descended from Israelites.
According to this hypothesis, the Inquisition was created to standardize various laws and the numerous jurisdictions Spain was divided into. It would be an administrative program analogous to the Santa Hermandad (the "Holy Brotherhood", ancestor to the Guardia Civil, a law enforcement body answering to the crown that prosecuted thieves and criminals across counties in a way local county authorities could not), an institution that would guarantee uniform prosecution of crimes against royal laws across all local jurisdictions.
The unusual authority wielded by the king over the nobility in the Kingdom of Castile contributed to the kingdom’s prosperity in Europe. This strong control kept the kingdom politically stable and prevented in-fighting that weakened other countries like England. Under the Trastámara dynasty, both kings of Castile and Aragon had lost power to the great nobles, who now formed dissenting and conspiratorial factions. Taxation and varying privileges differed from county to county, and powerful noble families constantly extorted the kings to attain further concessions, particularly in Aragon.
The main goals of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs were to unite their two kingdoms and strengthen royal influence to guarantee stability. In pursuit of this, they sought to unify the laws of their realms further and reduce the power of the nobility in certain local areas. They attained this partially by raw military strength by creating a combined army between the two of them that could outmatch the military of most noble coalitions in the Peninsula. It was impossible to change the entire laws of both realms by force alone, and due to reasonable suspicion of one another, the monarchs kept their kingdoms separate during their lifetimes. The only way to unify both kingdoms and ensure that Isabella, Ferdinand, and their descendants maintained the power of both kingdoms without uniting them in life was to find or create an executive, legislative, and judicial arm directly under the Crown empowered to act in both kingdoms. This goal, the hypothesis goes, might have given birth to the Spanish Inquisition.
The religious organization capable of overseeing this role was obvious. Catholicism was the only institution common to both kingdoms and the only one with enough popular support that the nobility could not easily attack it. Through the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and Ferdinand created a personal police force and personal code of law that rested above the structure of their respective realms without altering or mixing them and could operate freely in both. As the Inquisition had the backing of both kingdoms, it would exist independent of both the nobility and local interests of either kingdom.
According to this view, the prosecution of heretics would be secondary, or simply not considered different, from the prosecution of conspirators, traitors, or groups of any kind who planned to resist royal authority. Royal authority rested on the divine right and oaths of loyalty held before God, so the connection between religious deviation and political disloyalty would appear obvious. The disproportionately high representation of the nobility and high clergy among those investigated by the Inquisition supported this hypothesis, as well as the many administrative and civil crimes the Inquisition oversaw. The 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, from one kingdom to the other.
At a time in which most of Europe had already expelled the Jews from the Christian kingdoms, the "dirty blood" of Spaniards was met with open suspicion and contempt. As the world became smaller and foreign relations became more relevant to stay in power, this foreign image of "being the seed of Jews and Moors" may have become a problem. In addition, the coup that allowed Isabella to take the throne from Joanna of Castile ("la Beltraneja") and the Catholic Monarchs to marry had estranged Castile from Portugal, its historical ally, and created the need for new relationships. Similarly, Aragon's ambitions lay in control of the Mediterranean and the defense against France. As their policy of royal marriages proved, the Catholic Monarchs were deeply concerned about France's growing power and expected to create strong dynastic alliances across Europe. In this scenario, the Iberian reputation of being too tolerant was a problem.
Despite the prestige earned through the reconquest (Reconquista), the foreign image of Spaniards coexisted with an almost universal image of heretics and "bad Christians" due to the long coexistence between the three religions they had accepted in their lands. Anti-Jewish stereotypes created to justify or prompt the expulsion and expropriation of the European Jews applied to Spaniards in most European courts, and the idea of them being "greedy, gold-thirsty, cruel and violent" because of the "Jewish and Moorish blood" was prevalent in Europe prior to the discovery of America. Chronicles by foreign travelers circulated through Europe, describing the tolerant ambiance reigning in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand and how Moors and Jews were free to go about without risk of forced conversion. Past and common clashes between the Pope and the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula regarding the Inquisition in Castile’s case and regarding South Italy in Aragon’s case also reinforced their image of heretics in the international courts. These accusations and images could have had direct political and military consequences, especially considering that the union of two powerful kingdoms was a delicate moment that could prompt fear and violent reactions from neighbors, more so if combined with the expansion of the Ottoman Turks on the Mediterranean.
The creation of the Inquisition and the expulsion of both Jews and Moriscos may have been part of a strategy to whitewash the image of Spain and ease international fears regarding Spain's allegiance. In this scenario, the creation of the Inquisition could have been part of the Catholic Monarchs' strategy to "turn" away from African allies and "towards" Europe, a tool to turn both actual Spain and the Spanish image more European and improve relations with the Pope.
The alleged discovery of Morisco plots to support a possible Ottoman invasion was a crucial factor in their decision to create the Inquisition. At this time, the Ottoman Empire was experiencing rapid growth, and the Aragonese Mediterranean Empire was crumbling under debt and war exhaustion. Ferdinand reasonably feared that he would not be capable of repelling an Ottoman attack on Spain’s shores, especially if the Ottomans had internal help. The regions with the highest concentration of Moriscos were those close to the common naval crossings between Spain and Africa. The weakness of the Aragonese Naval Empire combined with the resentment of the higher nobility against the monarchs, the dynastic claims of Portugal on Castile, and the two monarchs’ exterior politics that turned away from Morocco and other African nations in favor of Europe, created a fear of a second Muslim invasion, and in turn a second Muslim occupation, that was hardly unfounded. This fear may have been the base reason for the expulsion of those citizens who had either a religious reason to support the invasion of the Ottomans (Moriscos) or no particular religious reason to be against it (Jews). The 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.
In favor of this view, there is the military sense it makes, the many early attempts of peaceful conversion and persuasion that the Monarchs used at the beginning of their reign, and the sudden turn towards the creation of the Inquisition and the edicts of expulsion when those initial attempts failed. The conquest of Naples by the Gran Capitan is also proof of an interest in Mediterranean expansion and re-establishment of Spanish power in that sea that was bound to generate frictions with the Ottoman Empire and other African nations. Therefore, the 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 creation of the Spanish Inquisition was consistent with the most important political philosophers of the Florentine School, with whom the kings were known to have contact (Guicciardini, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Segni, Pitti, Nardi, Varchi, etc.) Both Guicciardini and Machiavelli defended the importance of centralization and unification to create a strong state capable of repelling foreign invasions and also warned of the dangers of excessive social uniformity to the creativity and innovation of a nation. Machiavelli considered piety and morals desirable for the subjects but not so much for the ruler, who should use them as a way to unify its population. He also warned of the nefarious influence of a corrupt church in the creation of a selfish population and middle nobility, which had fragmented the peninsula and made it unable to resist either France or Aragon. German philosophers at the time were spreading the importance of a vassal sharing the religion of their lord.
The Inquisition may have just been the result of putting these ideas into practice. 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 Inquisition to enforce laws across it, maintain said religious unity, and control the local elites were consistent with most of those teachings.
Alternatively, the enforcement of Catholicism across the realm might indeed be the result of simple religious devotion by the monarchs. (see § purely religious reasons) The recent scholarship on the expulsion of the Jews leans towards the belief of religious motivations being at the bottom of it. However, considering the reports on Ferdinand’s political persona, that is unlikely the only reason. Machiavelli, among others, described Ferdinand as a man who didn’t know the meaning of piety, but who made political use of it and would have achieved little if he had known it. He was Machiavelli’s main inspiration while writing The Prince.
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church had made many attempts during the Middle Ages to take over Christian Spain politically, such as claiming the Church's ownership over all land reconquered from non-Christians (a claim that was rejected by Castile but accepted by Aragon and Portugal). In the past, the papacy had tried and partially succeeded in forcing the Mozarabic Rite out of Iberia. Its intervention had been pivotal for Aragon's loss of Rosellon. The meddling regarding Aragon's control over South Italy was even stronger historically. In their lifetime, the Catholic Monarchs had problems with Pope Paul II, a fervent proponent of absolute authority for the church over the kings. Carrillo actively opposed them both and often used Spain's "mixed blood" as an excuse to intervene. The papacy and the monarchs of Europe had been involved in a rivalry for power throughout the high Middle Ages that Rome already won in other powerful kingdoms, like France.
Since the legitimacy granted by the church was necessary for both monarchs, especially Isabella, to stay in power, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition may have been a way to concede to the Pope's demands and criticism regarding Spain's mixed religious heritage, while simultaneously ensuring that the Pope could hardly force the second Inquisition of his own and create a tool to control the power of the Roman Church in Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was unique at the time because it was not led by the Pope. Once the bull of creation was granted, the head of the Inquisition was the Monarch of Spain. It was in charge of enforcing the laws of the king regarding religion and other private-life matters, not of following orders from Rome, from which it was independent. This independence allowed the Inquisition to investigate, prosecute, and convict clergy for both corruption and treason of conspiracy against the crown (on the Pope's behalf, presumably) without the Pope's intervention. The Inquisition was, despite its title of "Holy", not necessarily formed by the clergy, and secular lawyers were equally welcome to it. If it was an attempt at keeping Rome out of Spain, it was an extremely successful and refined one. It was a bureaucratic body that had the nominal authority of the church and permission to prosecute members of the church, which the kings could not do, while answering only to the Spanish Crown. This did not prevent the Pope from having some influence on the decisions of Spanish monarchs, but it did force the influence to be through the kings, making direct influence very difficult.
Other hypotheses that circulate regarding the Spanish Inquisition's creation include:
Fray Alonso de Ojeda, a Dominican friar from Seville, convinced Queen Isabella of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478.A report, produced by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada—of converso family himself—corroborated this assertion.
Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull to establish an inquisition in Spain in 1478. Pope Sixtus IV granted the bull Exigit sincerae devotionis affectus, permitting the monarchs to select and appoint two or three priests over forty years of age to act as inquisitors. In 1483, Ferdinand and Isabella established a state council to administer the inquisition with the Dominican Friar Tomás de Torquemada acting as its president, even though Sixtus IV protested the activities of the inquisition in Aragon and its treatment of the conversos. Torquemada eventually assumed the title of Inquisitor-General
Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured Pope Sixtus IV to agree to an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support when the Turks were a threat to Rome. The pope issued a bull to stop the Inquisition but was pressured into withdrawing it. On 1 November 1478, Sixtus published the Papal bull, Exigit Sincerae Devotionis Affectus (Sincere Devotion Is Required), through which he gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors in their kingdoms. The first two inquisitors, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín were not named until two years later, on 27 September 1480, in Medina del Campo. The first auto de fé executedwas held in Seville on 6 February 1481: six people were burned alive. From there, the Inquisition grew rapidly in the Kingdom of Castile. By 1492, tribunals existed in eight Castilian cities: Ávila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo, and Valladolid. Sixtus IV promulgated a new bull (1482) categorically prohibiting the Inquisition's extension to Aragón, affirming that:
Outraged, Ferdinand feigned doubt about the bull's veracity, arguing that no sensible pope would have published such a document. He wrote the pope on 13 May 1482, saying: "Take care therefore not to let the matter go further, and to revoke any concessions and entrust us with the care of this question."
According to the book A History of the Jewish People,
In 1483, Jews were expelled from all of Andalusia. Though the pope wanted to crack down on abuses, Ferdinand pressured him to promulgate a new bull, threatening that he would otherwise separate the Inquisition from Church authority. Sixtus did so on 17 October 1483, naming Tomás de Torquemada Inquisidor General of Aragón, Valencia, and Catalonia.
Torquemada quickly established procedures for the Inquisition. In 1484, based on Nicholas Eymerich's Directorium Inquisitorum, he created a twenty-eight-article inquisitor's code, Compilación de las instrucciones del oficio de la Santa Inquisición (i.e. Compilation of the instructions of the office of the Holy Inquisition), essentially unaltered for more than three centuries following Torquemada's death. A new court would be announced with a thirty-day grace period for self-confessions and denunciations, and the gathering of accusations by neighbors and acquaintances. Evidence that was used to identify a crypto-Jew included the absence of chimney smoke on Saturdays (a sign the family might secretly be honoring the Sabbath), the buying of many vegetables before Passover, or the purchase of meat from a converted butcher. The court could employ physical torture to extract confessions. Crypto-Jews were allowed to confess and do penance, although those who relapsed were executed.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII attempted to allow appeals to Rome against the Inquisition, which would weaken the function of the institution as protection against the pope, but Ferdinand in December 1484 and again in 1509 decreed death and confiscation for anyone making use of such procedures without royal permission. With this, the Inquisition became the only institution that held authority across all the realms of the Spanish monarchy and, in all of them, a useful mechanism at the service of the crown. The cities of Aragón continued resisting and even saw revolt, as in Teruel, from 1484 to 1485. The murder of Inquisidor Pedro Arbués (later made a saint) in Zaragoza on 15 September 1485 caused public opinion to turn against the conversos and in favour of the Inquisition. In Aragón, the Inquisitorial courts 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; some estimate about 2,000 executions based on the documentation of the autos de fé, the majority being conversos of Jewish origin. Kamen 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.
The Inquisition had jurisdiction only over Christians. It had no power to investigate, prosecute, or convict Jews, Muslims, or any open member of other religions. Anyone who was known to identify as either Jew or Muslim was outside of Inquisitorial jurisdiction and could be tried only by the King. All the Inquisition could do in some of those cases was to deport the individual according to the King's law, but usually, even that had to go through a civil tribunal. The Inquisition had the authority to try only those who self-identified as Christians (initially for taxation purposes, later to avoid deportation as well) while practicing another religion de facto. Even those were treated as Christians. If they confessed or identified not as judaizantes but as fully practicing Jews, they fell back into the previously explained category and could not be targeted, although they would have pleaded guilty to previously lying about being Christian.
Though not subject to the Inquisition, Jews who refused to convert or leave Spain were called heretics and at risk of being burnt to death at a stake.
The 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. This remedy for securing the orthodoxy of conversos was eventually deemed inadequate since the main justification the monarchy gave for formally expelling all Jews from Spain was the "great harm suffered by Christians (i.e., conversos) from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with the Jews, who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith" according to the 1492 edict.
The Alhambra Decree, issued in January 1492, gave the choice between expulsion, conversion, or death. It was among the few expulsion orders that allowed conversion as an alternative and used as a proof of the religious, not racial, element of the measure. The enforcement of this decree was very unequal, with the focus mainly on coastal and southern regions—those at risk of Ottoman invasion—and more gradual and ineffective enforcement towards the interior.
Historic accounts of the number of Jews who left Spain were based on speculation, and some aspects were exaggerated by early accounts and historians: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Don Isaac Abravanel of 300,000. While few reliable statistics exist for the expulsion, modern estimates based on tax returns and population estimates of communities are much lower, with Kamen stating that of a population of approximately 80,000 Jews and 200,000 conversos, about 40,000 emigrated. The Jews of the kingdom of Castile emigrated mainly to Portugal (where the entire community was forcibly converted in 1497) and to North Africa. The Jews of the kingdom of Aragon fled to other Christian areas, including Italy, rather than to Muslim lands, as often assumed. Although the vast majority of conversos simply assimilated into the Catholic dominant culture, a minority continued to practice Judaism in secret and gradually migrated throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, mainly to areas where Sephardic communities were already present as a result of the Alhambra Decree.
The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped to 3% of the total. There was a rebound 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 sixteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition, founded in 1536. This led to a rapid increase in the trials of crypto-Jews, among them numerous important financiers. In 1691, during a number of autos de fé in Majorca, 37 chuetas, or conversos of Majorca, were burned alive.
During the eighteenth century, the number of conversos accused by the Inquisition decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Córdoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.
The Inquisition searched for false or relapsed converts among the Moriscos, who had converted from Islam. Beginning with a decree on 14 February 1502, Muslims in Granada had to choose between conversion to Christianity or expulsion. In the Crown of Aragon, most Muslims faced this choice after the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (1519–1523). The enforcement of the expulsion of the Moriscos was implemented unevenly, especially in the lands of the interior and the north. In these regions, coexistence had lasted for over five centuries and Moriscos were protected by the population; in many cases, expulsion orders were partially or completely ignored.
The War of the Alpujarras (1568–71), a general Muslim/Morisco uprising in Granada that expected to aid Ottoman disembarkation in the peninsula, ended in a forced dispersal of about half of the region's Moriscos throughout Castile and Andalusia as well as increased suspicions by Spanish authorities against this community.
Many Moriscos were suspected of practising Islam in secret, and the jealousy with which they guarded the privacy of their domestic life prevented the verification of this suspicion. Initially, they were not severely persecuted by the Inquisition, experiencing instead a policy of evangelization, a policy not followed by those conversos who were suspected of being crypto-Jews. There were various reasons for this. In the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon, a large number 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. Most importantly, the moriscos had integrated into Spanish society significantly better than the Jews, intermarrying with the population often, and were not seen as a foreign element, especially in rural areas. Still, fears ran high among the population that the Moriscos were traitorous, especially in Granada. Barbary pirates backed by Spain’s enemy, the Ottoman Empire, regularly raided the coast, and the Moriscos were suspected of aiding them.
In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, conditions worsened between Old Christians and Moriscos. The Morisco Revolt in Granada in 1568–1570 was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition intensified its attention on 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, who were a vast majority of the Kingdom's population. Still, the Moriscos did not experience the same harshness as Judaizing conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.
In 1609, King Philip III, upon the advice of his financial adviser the Duke of Lerma and Archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera, decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos. Hundreds of thousands of Moriscos were expelled. This was further fueled by the religious intolerance of Archbishop Ribera, who quoted the Old Testament texts ordering the enemies of God to be slain without mercy and setting forth the duties of kings to extirpate them. The edict required: "The Moriscos to depart, under the pain of death and confiscation, without trial or sentence... to take with them no money, bullion, jewels or bills of exchange.... just what they could carry." Although initial estimates of the number expelled, such as those of Henri Lapeyre, reach 300,000 Moriscos (or 4% of the total Spanish population), the extent and severity of the expulsion in much of Spain has been increasingly challenged by modern historians such as Trevor J. Dadson. Nevertheless, the eastern region of Valencia, where ethnic tensions were high, was particularly affected by the expulsion, suffering economic collapse and depopulation of much of its territory.
Of those permanently expelled, the majority finally settled in the Maghreb or the Barbary coast. Those who avoided expulsion or who managed to return were gradually absorbed by the dominant culture.
The Inquisition pursued some trials against Moriscos who remained or returned after expulsion: at the height of the Inquisition, cases against Moriscos are estimated to have constituted less than 10 percent of those judged by the Inquisition. Upon the coronation of Philip IV in 1621, the new king gave the order to desist from attempting to impose measures on the remaining Moriscos and returnees. In September 1628, the Council of the Supreme Inquisition ordered inquisitors in Seville not to prosecute expelled Moriscos "unless they cause significant commotion." The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving relatively light sentences. By the end of the 18th century, the indigenous practice of Islam is considered to have been effectively extinguished in Spain.
Despite popular myths about the Spanish Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain. Lutheran was an accusation used by the Inquisition to act against all those who acted in a way that was offensive to the church. The first of the trials against those labeled by the Inquisition as "Lutheran" were those against the sect of mystics known as the "Alumbrados" of Guadalajara and Valladolid. These trials were long and ended with prison sentences of differing lengths, though no person in the sect faced execution. The subject of the "Alumbrados" put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals and clerics who, interested in Erasmian ideas, had strayed from orthodoxy. Both Charles I and Philip II were confessed admirers of Erasmus.
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, numbering about 120. The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition's activities. A number of autos de fé were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family, and around 100 executions took place. The autos de fé of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism, which was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with.
After 1562, though the trials continued, the repression was much reduced. In the last decades of the 16th century, approximately 200 Spaniards were accused of being Protestant.
It is estimated that a dozen Protestant Spaniards were burned alive at the stake in the later part of the sixteenth century.
Protestantism was treated as a marker to identify agents of foreign powers and symptoms of political disloyalty as much as, if not more than, a cause of prosecution in itself.
Even though the Inquisition may have had theoretical permission to investigate Orthodox schismatics, it rarely did. There was no major war between Spain and any Orthodox country, so there was no reason to do so. There was one casualty tortured by those "Jesuits" (though most likely Franciscans) who administered the Spanish Inquisition in North America, according to authorities within the Eastern Orthodox Church: St. Peter the Aleut. Even that single report has various numbers of inaccuracies that make it problematic, and has no confirmation in the Inquisitorial archives.
The category "superstitions" includes trials related to witchcraft. The witch-hunt in Spain had much less intensity than in other European countries (particularly France, Scotland, and Germany). One remarkable case was that of Logroño, in which the witches of Zugarramurdi in Navarre were persecuted. During the auto de fé that took place in Logroño on 7 and 8 November 1610, six people were burned and another five burned in effigy. The role of the Inquisition in cases of witchcraft was much more restricted than is commonly believed. Well after the foundation of the Inquisition, jurisdiction over sorcery and witchcraft remained in secular hands. In general, the Spanish Inquisition maintained a skeptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it as a mere superstition without any basis. Alonso de Salazar Frías, who took the Edict of Faith to various parts of Navarre after the trials of Logroño, noted in his report to the Suprema that "there were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked and written about".
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 misbehaviour of the clergy. Many were brought to trial for affirming that simple fornication (sex between unmarried persons) was not a sin or for putting in doubt different aspects of Christian faith, such as Transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary. Also, members of the clergy themselves were occasionally accused of heretical propositions. These offences rarely led to severe penalties.
Pope Clement VII granted the Inquisition jurisdiction over sodomy within Aragon in 1524 in response to a petition from the Saragossa tribunal. The Inquisition in Castile declined to take the same jurisdiction, making sodomy the only major crime with such a significant regional discrepancy. Even within Aragon, the treatment of sodomy varied significantly by region because the pope's decree required that it be prosecuted according to each area's local law. For instance, contemporaries considered the tribunal of the city of Zaragoza unusually harsh.
The first person known to have been executed by the Inquisition for sodomy was a priest, Salvador Vidal, in 1541. Others convicted of sodomy received sentences including fines, burning in effigy, public whipping, and the galleys. The first burning for sodomy took place in Valencia in 1572.
Sodomy was an expansive term; while a 1560 decision ruled that lesbian sex not involving a dildo could not be prosecuted as sodomy, bestiality routinely was, especially in Saragossa in the 1570s. Men might also be prosecuted based on accusations of engaging in heterosexual sodomy with their wives. For that time and place, the word "sodomy" covered several kinds of not procreative sexual acts denounced by the Church, like coitus interruptus, masturbation, fellatio, anal coitus (whether heterosexual or homosexual), etc.
Those accused included 19% clergy, 6% nobles, 37% workers, 19% servants, and 18% soldiers and sailors. Nearly all of almost 500 cases of sodomy between persons concerned the relationship between an older man and an adolescent, often by coercion, with only a few cases where the couple were consenting homosexual adults. About 100 of the total involved allegations of child abuse. Adolescents were typically punished more leniently than adults, but only when they were very young (approximately below the age of twelve) or when the case concerned rape did they have a chance to avoid punishment altogether.
Prosecutions for sodomy gradually declined, primarily due to decisions from the Suprema intended to reduce the publicity for sodomy cases. In 1579, public autos de fé ceased to include people convicted on sodomy charges unless they were sentenced to death; even the death sentences were excluded from public proclamation after 1610. In 1589, Aragon raised the minimum age for sodomy executions to 25, and by 1633, executions for sodomy had generally come to an end.
The Roman Catholic Church has regarded Freemasonry as heretical since about 1738; the suspicion of Freemasonry was potentially a capital offence. Spanish Inquisition records reveal two prosecutions in Spain and only a few more throughout the Spanish Empire. In 1815, Francisco Javier 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 atheism, to sedition and to all errors and crimes." He then instituted a purge during which Spaniards could be arrested on the charge of being "suspected of Freemasonry".
As one manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition worked 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 Leuven in 1550, with an appendix dedicated to Spanish texts. Subsequent Indexes were published in 1559, 1583, 1612, 1632, and 1640.
Included in the Indices, at one point, were some of the great works of Spanish literature, but most of the works were plays and religious in nature. 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 then 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. Once approved and published, the circulating text also faced the possibility of post-hoc censorship by being denounced by 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. This proved not only impractical but also contrary to the goals of having a literate and well-educated clergy. 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 argue that such strict control was impossible in practice and that there was much more liberty in this respect than is often believed. 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 the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the development 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, Valentine Naibod, and Thomas More (known in Spain as Tomás Moro). One of the most outstanding and best-known cases in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is that of 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.
One of the major effects of the Inquisition was to end free thought and scientific thought in Spain. As one contemporary Spaniard in exile put it: "Our country is a land of pride and envy ... barbarism; down there one cannot produce any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence was imposed on the learned." For the next few centuries, while the rest of Europe was slowly awakened by the influence of the Enlightenment, Spain stagnated. This conclusion is contested.
The censorship of books was very ineffective and prohibited books circulated in Spain without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom than other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries. The apparent paradox is explained by both the hermeticist religious ideas of the Spanish church and monarchy and the budding seed of what would become enlightened absolutism taking shape in Spain. The list of banned books was not, as interpreted sometimes, a list of evil books but a list of books that lay people were very likely to misinterpret. The presence of highly symbolical and high-quality literature on the list was so explained. These metaphorical or parable-sounding books were listed as not meant for free circulation, but there might be no objections to the book itself and the circulation among scholars was mostly free. Most of these books were carefully collected by the elite. The practical totality of the prohibited books can be found now, as then, in the library of the Monasterio del Escorial, carefully collected by Philip II and Philip III. The collection was "public" after Philip II's death and members of universities, intellectuals, courtesans, clergy, and certain branches of the nobility didn't have too many problems accessing them and commissioning authorised copies. The 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.
The Inquisition also pursued offences against morals and general social order, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular, there were 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 two hundred lashes and five to ten years of "service to the Crown". Said service could be whatever the court deemed most beneficial for the nation, but it usually was either five years as an oarsman in a royal galley for those without any qualification (possibly a death sentence) or ten years working maintained but without salary in a public Hospital or charitable institution of the sort for those with some special skill, such as doctors, surgeons, or lawyers. The penalty was five to seven years as an oarsman in the case of Portugal.
Under the category of "unnatural marriage" fell any marriage or attempted marriage between two individuals who could not procreate. The Catholic Church, in general, and in a nation constantly at war like Spain, emphasised the reproductive goal of marriage.
The Spanish Inquisition's policy in this regard was restrictive but applied in a very egalitarian way. It considered any non-reproductive marriage unnatural and any reproductive marriage natural, regardless of gender or sex involved. The two forms of obvious male sterility were either due to damage to the genitals through castration or accidental wounding at war (capón) or to some genetic condition that might keep the man from completing puberty (lampiño). Female sterility was also a reason to declare a marriage unnatural but was harder to prove. One case that dealt with marriage, sex, and gender was the trial of Eleno de Céspedes.
The notion of religion and civil law being separate is a modern construction and made no sense in the 15th century, so there was no difference between breaking a law regarding religion and breaking a law regarding tax collection. The difference between them is a modern projection the institution itself did not have. As such, the Inquisition was the prosecutor (in some cases the only prosecutor) of any crimes that could be perpetrated without the public taking notice (mainly domestic crimes, crimes against the weakest members of society, administrative crimes and forgeries, organized crime, and crimes against the Crown).
Examples include crimes associated with sexual or family relations such as rape and sexual violence (the Inquisition was the first and only body who punished it across the nation), bestiality, pedophilia (often overlapping with sodomy), incest, child abuse or neglect and (as discussed) bigamy. Non-religious crimes also included procurement (not prostitution), human trafficking, smuggling, forgery or falsification of currency, documents or signatures, tax fraud (many religious crimes were considered subdivisions of this one), illegal weapons, swindles, disrespect to the Crown or its institutions (the Inquisition included, but also the church, the guard, and the kings themselves), espionage for a foreign power, conspiracy, treason.
The non-religious crimes processed by the Inquisition accounted for a considerable percentage of its total investigations and are often hard to separate in the statistics, even when documentation is available. The line between religious and non-religious crimes did not exist in 15th-century Spain as a legal concept. Many of the crimes listed here and some of the religious crimes listed in previous sections were contemplated under the same article. For example, "sodomy" included paedophilia as a subtype. Often, part of the data given for prosecution of male homosexuality corresponds to convictions for paedophilia, not adult homosexuality. In other cases, religious and non-religious crimes were seen as distinct but equivalent. The treatment of public blasphemy and street swindlers was similar (since both involved "misleading the public in a harmful way"). Making counterfeit currency and heretic proselytism were also treated similarly; both of them were punished by death and subdivided in similar ways since both were "spreading falsifications". In general, heresy and falsifications of material documents were treated similarly by the Spanish Inquisition, indicating that they may have been thought of as equivalent actions.
Trials were often further complicated by the attempts of witnesses or victims to add further charges, especially witchcraft. Like with Eleno de Céspedes, charges for witchcraft done in this way, or in general, were quickly dismissed but they often show in the statistics as investigations made.
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 which there were two Inquisitors General, one in the kingdom of Castile, and the other in Aragon.
The Inquisitor General presided over the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition (commonly 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 throughout the Inquisition's history, but it was never more than ten). Over time, the authority of the Suprema grew at the expense of the power of the Inquisitor General.
By the 17th century, two councilors from the Royal Council of Castile played a key role in overseeing the Council of the Spanish Inquisition, advising the monarchy on legal and religious matters. At this time, the Spanish Inquisition consisted of six primary councilors, two afternoon members from the Royal Council of Castile, and a permanent Dominican seat. Additionally, the fiscal (prosecutor) was responsible for managing inquisitorial trials and legal proceedings. With royal approval, the Council adjusted its structure to improve efficiency, including chamber divisions for handling cases. Notable members included:
The Royal Council and the Inquisition remained deeply intertwined, enforcing religious conformity while serving as an instrument of monarchical control.
The Suprema met every morning, except 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 "minor heresies," cases of perceived unacceptable sexual behavior, bigamy, witchcraft, etc.
Below the Suprema were the various tribunals of the Inquisition, initially itinerant, which installed themselves where they were necessary to combat heresy but later settled in fixed locations. During 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 (1482), Barcelona (1484), and Majorca (1488). Ferdinand the Catholic also established the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily (1513), housed in Palermo, and Sardinia, in the town of Sassari. In the Americas, tribunals were established in Lima and in Mexico City (1569) and, in 1610, in Cartagena de Indias (present-day Colombia).
Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, calificadors (qualifiers), an alguacil (bailiff), and a fiscal (prosecutor); new positions were added as the institution matured. The inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians; in 1608, Philip III even stipulated that all inquisitors needed to have a background in law. The inquisitors rarely remained in the position for a long time: for the Court of Valencia, for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests who were not members of religious orders) and had a university education.
The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation, investigating the denunciations, and interrogating the witnesses by the use of physical and mental torture. The calificadores were generally theologians; it fell to them to determine whether the defendant's conduct added up to a crime against the faith. Consultants were expert jurists who advised the court on 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 Secret), 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, responsible for detaining, jailing, and physically torturing the defendant. Other civil employees were the nuncio, ordered to spread official notices of the court, and the alcaide, the 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 honor 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 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 of its own budget, the Inquisition depended almost exclusively on the confiscation 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 memorandum that a converso from Toledo directed to Charles I:
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, which described 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 the self-incriminated who presented themselves within a period of grace (usually ranging from thirty to forty days) 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. These were encouraged to denounce others who had also committed offences, informants being the Inquisition's primary source of information. After about 1500, the Edicts of Grace were replaced by the Edicts of Faith, which left out the grace period and instead encouraged the denunciation of those deemed guilty.
The denunciations were anonymous, and the defendants had no way of knowing the identities of their accusers. This was one of the points most criticized by those who opposed the Inquisition. In practice, false denunciations were frequent. Denunciations were made for a variety of reasons apart from genuine concern. Some just went after non-conformists. Others wished to hurt a neighbor or get rid of an opponent.
This method turned everyone into an agent of the Inquisition and made everyone aware that a simple word or deed could bring them before the tribunal. Denunciation was elevated to the rank of a superior religious duty, filled the nation with spies, and made each individual an object of suspicion to their neighbor, family, and any strangers they might meet.
After a denunciation, the case was examined by the calificadores, who had to determine whether there was heresy involved. This was followed by the detention of the accused. In practice, many were detained in preventive custody, and many cases of lengthy incarcerations occurred, lasting up to two years before the calificadores examined the case.
Detention of the accused entailed the preventive sequestration of their property by the Inquisition. The property of the prisoner was used to pay for procedural expenses and the accused's maintenance and costs. Often, the relatives of the defendant found themselves in outright misery. This situation was remedied only by following instructions written in 1561. However, Llorente, despite having consulted numerous records of old Inquisition proceedings, did not find any record of such an agreement in favor of the children of condemned heretics.
Some authors, such as apologist William Thomas Walsh, stated that 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 imprisoned. The prisoners remained isolated, and, during this time, they were not allowed to attend Mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of the Inquisition were no worse than those of secular authorities, and there are even certain testimonies that occasionally they were much better. According to William Walsh, the miseries of the Jews "are not the result, fundamentally, of the hatred and misunderstanding of others, but the consequence of their own stubborn rejection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ".
The inquisitorial process consisted of a series of hearings in which both the denouncers and the defendant gave separate testimony. A defense counsel, a so-called lawyer, a member of the tribunal itself, was assigned to the defendant; his role was simply to advise the accused and to encourage them to speak the truth. He was obliged to renounce the defense at the moment when he realized his client's guilt.
The prosecution was directed by the fiscal. Interrogation of the defendant was done in the presence of the notario del 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.
To defend themselves, the accused had two main choices: abonos (to find favourable and character witnesses) or tachas (to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers — whose identity he did not know — were not trustworthy, and were his personal enemies.
The structure of the trials was similar to modern trials and, according to apologists, advanced for the time with regard to fairness. The Inquisition, "professional and efficient", was dependent on the political power of the King. The lack of separation of powers allows for assuming questionable fairness in certain scenarios. The fairness of the Inquisitorial tribunals is alleged by apologists to be among the best in early modern Europe when it came to the trial of laymen. There are also testimonies by former prisoners that, if believed, suggest that said fairness was less than ideal when national or political interests were involved.
The historian Walter Ullmann thinks very different:
To obtain a confession or information relevant to an investigation, the Inquisition used torture, as prescribed in the instrucciones. It is impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy the number of cases in which it was employed during the Inquisition's existence.
Torture would be applied if the alleged heresy was "half proven" and could be repeated, according to Article XV of Torquemada's instructions. Henry Lea estimates that between 1575 and 1610, the court of Toledo tortured approximately a third of those processed for Protestant heresy. Nearly all of the accused in several cases tried by the Lima tribunal between 1635 and 1639 appear to have been tortured; the Valladolid tribunal report for 1624 reveals that in eleven cases involving Jews and one involving a Protestant used torture; in 1655, all nine cases involving Jews employed torture.
The recently opened Vatican Archives suggest lower numbers. "In truth," says Thomas Madden, "the Inquisition brought order, justice, and compassion to combat rampant secular and popular persecutions of heretics." And concludes: "The Spanish people loved their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so long." In other periods, the proportions of torture varied remarkably.
Torture was employed in all civil and religious trials in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition allegedly used it more restrictively than was common at the time. Unlike both civil trials and other inquisitions, it had strict regulations in relation to when, what, whom, frequency, duration, and supervision. According to some scholars, the Spanish Inquisition engaged in torture less often and with greater care than secular courts.
Kamen and other scholars cite the lack of evidence for the use of torture. Their conclusions are based on research uncovered in newly opened files of the Spanish Inquisition's archives. Stories of torture and other maltreatment of prisoners appear to have been based on Protestant propaganda as well as popular imagination and ignorance.
Among the methods of torture allowed were garrucha, toca, and the potro (which were all used in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals). The application of the garrucha, also known as the strappado, consisted of suspending the victim from the ceiling by the wrists, which are tied behind the back. Sometimes weights were tied to the feet, with a series of lifts and violent drops, during which the arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated.
The use of the toca (cloth), also called interrogatorio mejorado del agua (enhanced water interrogation), now known as waterboarding, is better documented. It consisted of forcing the victim to ingest water poured from a jar so that they had the impression of drowning. The potro, the rack, in which the limbs were slowly pulled apart, was thought to be the instrument of torture used most frequently. The assertion that confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum (literally: '[a person's] confession is truth, not made by way of torture') sometimes follows a description of how, after torture had ended, the subject "freely" confessed to the offences. In practice, those who recanted confessions made during torture knew that they could be tortured again. Under torture, or even harsh interrogation, comments Cullen Murphy, people will say anything. Bernard Délicieux, the Franciscan friar who was tortured by the Inquisition and ultimately died in prison as a result of the abuse, said the Inquisition's tactics would have proved St. Peter and St. Paul to be heretics.
Once the process concluded, the inquisitors met with a representative of the bishop and with the consultores (consultants), experts in theology or Canon Law (but not necessarily clergy themselves), which was called the consulta de fe (faith consultation/religion check). The case was voted and sentence pronounced, which had to be unanimous. In case of discrepancies, the Suprema had to be informed.
The results of the trial could be the following:
Frequently, cases were judged in absentia. When the accused died before the trial finished, the condemned were burned in effigy. The death of an accused did not extinguish the inquisitorial actions, even up to forty years after the death. When it was considered proven that the deceased were heretics in their lifetime, their corpses were exhumed and burned, their property confiscated and the heirs disinherited.
The distribution of the punishments varied considerably over time. It is believed that sentences of death were enforced most frequently in the early stages of the Inquisition. According to García Cárcel, one of the most active courts—the court of Valencia—employed the death penalty in 40% of cases before 1530, but later that percentage dropped to 3%. By the middle of the 16th century, inquisition courts viewed torture as unnecessary, and death sentences had become rare.
If the sentence was condemnatory, this implied that the condemned had to participate in the ceremony of an auto de fé (more commonly known in English as an auto-da-fé) that solemnized their return to the Church (in most cases), or punishment as an impenitent heretic. The autos de fé could be public (auto publico or auto general) or private (auto particular).
Although initially the public autos did not have any special solemnity nor sought a large attendance of spectators, with time they became expensive and solemn ceremonies, a display of the great power shared by the Church and the State, celebrated with large public crowds, amidst a festive atmosphere. The auto de fé 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 (frequently in the largest plaza of the city), generally on holidays. The rituals related to the auto began the previous night (the "procession of the Green Cross") and sometimes lasted the whole day.
The auto de fé frequently was taken to the canvas by painters: one of the better-known examples is the 1683 painting by Francisco Rizi, held by the Prado Museum in Madrid that represents the auto celebrated in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on 30 June 1680. The last public auto de fé took place in 1691.
The auto de fé involved a Catholic Mass, prayer, a public procession of those found guilty, and a reading of their sentences. They took place in public squares or esplanades and lasted several hours; ecclesiastical and civil authorities attended. Artistic representations of the auto de fé usually depict torture and the burning at the stake. This type of activity never took place during an auto de fé, which was in essence a religious act. Torture was not administered after a trial concluded, and executions were always held after and separate from the auto de fé, though in the minds and experiences of observers and those undergoing the confession and execution, the separation of the two might be experienced as merely a technicality.
The first recorded auto de fé was held in Paris in 1242, during the reign of Louis IX. The first Spanish auto de fé did not take place until 1481 in Seville; six of the men and women subjected to this first religious ritual were later executed by being burned alive at the stake.
The 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. The Marquis, himself a familiar, transformed it into a royal court, and the heretics continued to be persecuted, as so the "high spirits".
Autos de fé also took place in Mexico, Brazil and Peru: contemporary historians of the Conquistadors such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo record them. They also took place in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, following the establishment of Inquisition there in 1562–1563.
The arrival of the Enlightenment in Spain slowed inquisitorial activity. In the first half of the 18th century, 111 were condemned to be burned in person, and 117 in effigy, most of them for judaizing. In the reign of Philip V, there were 125 autos de fé, while in the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only 44.
During the 18th century, the Inquisition changed: Enlightenment ideas were the closest threat that had to be fought. The main figures of the Spanish Enlightenment were in favour of the abolition of the Inquisition, and many were processed by the Holy Office, among them Olavide, in 1776; Iriarte, in 1779; and Jovellanos, in 1796; Jovellanos sent a report to Charles IV in which he indicated the inefficiency of the Inquisition's courts and the ignorance of those who operated them: "... friars who take [the position] only to obtain gossip and exemption from the choir; who are ignorant of foreign languages, who only know a little scholastic theology."
In its new role, the Inquisition tried to accentuate its function of censoring publications but found that Charles III had secularized censorship procedures, and, on many occasions, the authorization of the Council of Castile hit the more intransigent position of the Inquisition. Since the Inquisition itself was an arm of the state, being within the Council of Castile, civil rather than ecclesiastical censorship usually prevailed. This loss of influence can also be explained because the foreign Enlightenment texts entered the peninsula through prominent members of the nobility or government, influential people with whom it was very difficult to interfere. Thus, for example, Diderot's Encyclopedia entered Spain thanks to special licenses granted by the king.
After the French Revolution the Council of Castile, fearing that revolutionary ideas would penetrate Spain's borders, decided to reactivate the Holy Office that was directly charged with the persecution of French works. An Inquisition edict of December 1789, that received the full approval of Charles IV and Floridablanca, stated that:
The fight from within against the Inquisition was almost always clandestine. The first texts that questioned the Inquisition and praised the ideas of Voltaire or Montesquieu appeared in 1759. After the suspension of pre-publication censorship on the part of the Council of Castile in 1785, the newspaper El Censor began the publication of protests against the activities of the Holy Office by means of a rationalist critique. Valentin de Foronda published Espíritu de los Mejores Diarios, a plea in favour of freedom of expression that was avidly read in the salons. Also, in the same vein, Manuel de Aguirre wrote On Toleration in El Censor, El Correo de los Ciegos and El Diario de Madrid.
During the reign of Charles IV of Spain (1788–1808), in spite of the fears that the French Revolution provoked, several events accelerated the decline of the Inquisition. The state stopped being a mere social organizer and began to worry about the well-being of the public. As a result, the land-holding power of the Church was reconsidered, in the señoríos and more generally in the accumulated wealth that had prevented social progress. The power of the throne increased, under which Enlightenment thinkers found better protection for their ideas. Manuel Godoy and Antonio Alcalá Galiano were openly hostile to an institution whose only role had been reduced to censorship and was the very embodiment of the Spanish Black Legend, internationally, and was not suitable to the political interests of the moment:
The Inquisition was first abolished during the domination of Napoleon and the reign of Joseph Bonaparte (1808–1812). In 1813, the liberal deputies of the Cortes of Cádiz also obtained its abolition, largely as a result of the Holy Office's condemnation of the popular revolt against French invasion. But the Inquisition was reconstituted when Ferdinand VII recovered the throne on 1 July 1814. Juan Antonio Llorente, who had been the Inquisition's general secretary in 1789, became a Bonapartist and published a critical history in 1817 from his French exile, based on his privileged access to its archives.
Possibly as a result of Llorente's criticisms, the Inquisition was once again 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 Inquisition was not formally re-established, although, de facto, it returned under the Congregation of the Meetings of Faith (Juntas da Fé), created in the dioceses by King Ferdinand VII. The last known person to be executed by the Inquisition was Cayetano Ripoll, a school teacher who was condemned and hanged by the Congregation on 26 July 1826.
On that day, Ripoll was hanged in Valencia, for having taught deist principles. This execution occurred against the backdrop of a European-wide scandal concerning the despotic attitudes still prevailing in Spain. 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 Martínez de la Rosa.
The Alhambra Decree that had expelled the Jews was formally rescinded on 16 December 1968 by the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, after the Second Vatican Council rejected the idea that Jews are deicides.
The prohibitions, persecution and eventual Jewish mass emigration from Spain and Portugal probably had adverse effects on the development of the Spanish and the Portuguese economy. Jews and Non-Catholic Christians reportedly had substantially better numerical skills than the Catholic majority, which might be due to the Jewish religious doctrine, which focused strongly on education. Even when Jews were forced to quit their highly skilled urban occupations, their numeracy advantage persisted. However, during the inquisition, spillover-effects of these skills were rare because of forced separation and Jewish emigration, which was detrimental for economic development.
It is unknown exactly how much wealth was confiscated from converted Jews and others tried by the Inquisition. Wealth confiscated in one year of persecution in the small town of Guadaloupe paid the costs of building a royal residence. There are numerous records of the opinion of ordinary Spaniards of the time that "the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people". "They were burnt only for the money they had", a resident of Cuenca averred. "They burn only the well-off", said another. In 1504 an accused stated, "only the rich were burnt". In 1484 Catalina de Zamora was accused of asserting that "this Inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith. It is the goods that are the heretics." This saying passed into common usage in Spain. In 1524 a treasurer informed Charles V that his predecessor had received ten million ducats from the conversos, but the figure is unverified. In 1592 an inquisitor admitted that most of the fifty women he arrested were rich. In 1676, the Suprema claimed it had confiscated over 700,000 ducats for the royal treasury (which was paid money only after the Inquisition's own budget, amounting in one known case to only 5%). The property on Mallorca alone in 1678 was worth "well over 2,500,000 ducats".
García Cárcel estimates that the total number prosecuted by the Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000; applying the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of 1560–1700—about 2%—the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to death. Nevertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed. Other authors disagree and estimate a max death toll between 1% and 5%, (depending on the time span used) combining all the processes the inquisition carried, both religious and non-religious ones. In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000).
Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of the Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National Historical Archive of Spain (Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the annual relations of all processes between 1540 and 1700. This material provides information for approximately 44,674 judgments. These 44,674 cases include 826 executions in persona and 778 in effigie (i.e. an effigy was burned). This material is far from being complete—for example, the tribunal of Cuenca is entirely omitted, because no relaciones de causas from this tribunal have been found, and significant gaps concern some other tribunals (e.g., Valladolid). Many more cases not reported to the Suprema are known from the other sources (i.e., no relaciones de causas from Cuenca have been found, but its original records have been preserved), but were not included in Contreras-Henningsen's statistics for the methodological reasons. William Monter estimates 1000 executions between 1530 and 1630 and 250 between 1630 and 1730.
The archives of the Suprema only provide information about processes prior to 1560. To study the processes themselves, it is necessary to examine the archives of the local tribunals, the majority of which have been lost to the devastation of war, the ravages of time or other events. Some archives have survived including those of Toledo, where 12,000 were judged for offences related to heresy, mainly minor "blasphemy", and those of Valencia. These indicate that the Inquisition was most active in the period between 1480 and 1530 and that during this period the percentage condemned to death was much more significant than in the years that followed. Modern estimates show approximately 2,000 executions in persona in the whole of Spain up to 1530.
The statistics of Henningsen and Contreras are based entirely on relaciones de causas. The number of years for which cases are documented varies for different tribunals. Data for the Aragonese Secretariat are probably complete, some small lacunae may concern only Valencia and possibly Sardinia and Cartagena, but the numbers for Castilian Secretariat—except Canaries and Galicia—should be considered as minimal due to gaps in the documentation. In some cases it is remarked that the number does not concern the whole period 1540–1700.
Table of sentences pronounced in the public autos de fé in Spain (excluding tribunals in Sicily, Sardinia and Latin America) between 1701 and 1746:
According to Toby Green, the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law", and they sometimes had motives for imprisoning or executing alleged offenders that had nothing to do with punishing religious nonconformity. Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios about one Inquisitor, Diego Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two women; he then kept the women as mistresses. According to Barrios
Some writers disagree with Green. These authors do not necessarily deny the abuses of power, but classify them as politically instigated and comparable to those of any other law enforcement body of the period. Criticisms, usually indirect, have gone from the suspiciously sexual overtones or similarities of these accounts with unrelated older antisemitic accounts of kidnap and torture, to the clear proofs of control that the king had over the institution, to the sources used by Green, or just by reaching completely different conclusions.
According to a 2021 study, "municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational attainment, and trust today."
How historians and commentators have viewed the Spanish Inquisition has changed over time and continues to be a source of controversy. Before and during the 19th century, historical interest focused on who was being persecuted. In the early and mid-20th century, historians examined the specifics of what happened and how it influenced Spanish history. In the later 20th and 21st centuries, some historians have re-examined how severe the Inquisition truly was, calling into question some of the assumptions made in earlier periods.
Before the rise of professional historians in the 19th century, the Spanish Inquisition had been portrayed primarily by Protestant scholars who saw it as the archetypal symbol of Catholic intolerance and ecclesiastical power. The Spanish Inquisition for them was largely associated with the persecution of Protestants. William H. Prescott described the Inquisition as an "eye that never slumbered". Despite the existence of extensive documentation regarding the trials and procedures, and to the Inquisition's deep bureaucratization, none of these sources was studied outside of Spain, and Spanish scholars arguing against the predominant view were automatically dismissed. The 19th-century professional historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador de los Ríos, were the first to successfully challenge this perception in the international sphere and get foreign scholars to take note of their discoveries. Said scholars would obtain international recognition and start a period of revision on the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition.
At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the groundbreaking History of the Inquisition in Spain. This influential work describes the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of progress." Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation in no uncertain terms, calling it "theocratic absolutism" at its worst. In the context of the polarization between Protestants and Catholics during the second half of the 19th century, some of Lea's contemporaries, as well as most modern scholars thought Lea's work had an anti-Catholic bias.
Starting in the 1920s, Jewish scholars picked up where Lea's work left off. They published Yitzhak Baer's History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos and, after World War II, the work of Haim Beinart, who for the first time published trial transcripts of cases involving conversos.
Contemporary historians who subscribe to the idea that the image of the Inquisition in historiography has been systematically deformed by the Black Legend include Edward Peters, Philip Wayne Powell, William S. Maltby, Richard Kagan, Margaret R. Greer, Helen Rawlings, Ronnie Hsia, Lu Ann Homza, Stanley G. Payne, Andrea Donofrio, Irene Silverblatt, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Charles Gibson, and Joseph Pérez. Contemporary historians who partially accept an impact of the Black Legend but deny other aspects of the hypothesis include Henry Kamen, David Nirenberg and Karen Armstrong.
Toby Green, while accepting that there was a certain demonization of the Spanish Inquisition in comparison with other contemporary persecutions, argues that the habitual use of torture should not be denied, and that correcting the "black legend" should not mean replacing it with a "white legend." Richard L. Kagan says that Henry Kamen failed to "enter the belly of the beast and assess what it really meant to the people who lived with it." Kamen does not, according to Kagan, "lead the reader through an actual trial. Had he done so, a reader might conclude that the institution he portrays as relatively benign in hindsight was also capable of inspiring fear and desperate attempts to escape, and thus more deserving of its earlier reputation." For Kagan, in order to reconstruct the world of those who were trapped in the Inquisition's net, studies that thoroughly examine the meticulous archives of the Inquisition are necessary.
The works of Juderias in (1913) and other Spanish scholars prior to him were mostly ignored by international scholarship until 1960.
One of the first books to build on them and internationally challenge the classical view was The Spanish Inquisition (1965) by Henry Kamen. Kamen argued that the Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or as powerful as commonly believed. The book was very influential and largely responsible for subsequent studies in the 1970s to try to quantify (from archival records) the Inquisition's activities. 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, according to these studies, the Inquisition served principally as a forum Spaniards occasionally used to humiliate and punish people they did not like: blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners and, in Aragon, homosexuals, and horse smugglers. Kamen went on to publish two more books in 1985 and 2006 that incorporated new findings, further supporting the view that the Inquisition was not as bad as once described by Lea and others. Along similar lines is Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988).
One of the most important works about the inquisition's relation to the Jewish conversos or New Christians is The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (1995/2002) by Benzion Netanyahu. It challenges the view that most conversos were actually practicing Judaism in secret and were persecuted for their crypto-Judaism. Rather, according to Netanyahu, the persecution was fundamentally racial, and was a matter of envy of their success in Spanish society. This view has been challenged; the majority of historians either align with religious causes or with merely cultural ones, with no significant racial element.
The literature of the 18th century approaches the theme of the Inquisition from a critical point of view. In Candide by Voltaire, the Inquisition appears as the epitome of intolerance and arbitrary justice in Europe.
During the Romantic Period, the Gothic novel, which was primarily a genre developed in Protestant countries, frequently associated Catholicism with terror and repression. This vision of the Spanish Inquisition appears in, among other works, The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (set in Madrid during the Inquisition, but can be seen as commenting on the French Revolution and the Terror); Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki.
The literature of the 19th century tends to focus on the element of torture employed by the Inquisition. In France, in the early 19th century, the epistolary novel Cornelia Bororquia, or the Victim of the Inquisition, which has been attributed to Spaniard Luiz Gutiérrez, and is based on the case of María de Bohórquez, ferociously criticizes the Inquisition and its representatives.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov, (1880) there is a chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor." A story within a story (several times published separately in book form) tells the appearance of Jesus Christ in Seville, during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, an old Cardinal, he is condemned to die at the stake "like the vilest of heretics". The Inquisitor questions him: "Is it You? (...) Don't answer, remain silent. And You have no right to add anything to what you have already said. So why have You come to disturb us? For You really have come to disturb us, and You know it." Christ doesn't say a word, he just kisses him. At the end of the episode, the Inquisitor releases him with the words: "Go and don't come back any more... never... never, never!"
One of the best-known stories of Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum", explores the use of torture by the Inquisition.
The Inquisition also appears in 20th-century literature. La Gesta del Marrano, by the Argentine author Marcos Aguinis, portrays the length of the Inquisition's arm to reach people in Argentina during the 16th and 17th centuries. The first book in Les Daniels' "Don Sebastian Vampire Chronicles", The Black Castle (1978), is set in 15th-century Spain and includes both descriptions of Inquisitorial questioning and an auto de fé, as well as Tomás de Torquemada, who is featured in one chapter. The Marvel Comics series Marvel 1602 shows the Inquisition targeting Mutants for "blasphemy". The character Magneto also appears as the Grand Inquisitor. The second of the Captain Alatriste novels by the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte has the narrator being tortured by the Inquisition. In 1998, the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes published the historical novel The Heretic, about the Protestants of Valladolid and their repression by the Inquisition. Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile deals directly with the Spanish Inquisition.
In the novel La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falcones, published in 2006 and set in the 14th century, there are scenes of inquisition investigations in small towns and a great scene in Barcelona.