The spanish inquisition

For Tudor martyrologist John Foxe, the “cruel and barbarous Inquisition of Spain” was a mire of inexcusable atrocities. Prisoners would be held “in darkness palpable, in horrors infinite, in fear miserable, wrestling with the assaults of death.” There was no end to the “injuries, threats, whippings and scourgings, tortures and racks”, but the secrecy of the institution was equally offensive to Foxe. “All the proceedings of the court of that execrable Inquisition [are] open to no man, but all is done in a hugger-mugger, and in close corners… by covert ways and secret counsels.”

This is the image of the Spanish Inquisition that has held sway for centuries and which remains in the popular historical imagination. Of late, however, scholars have sought to provide a more nuanced understanding: not to excuse the Inquisition’s many excesses, but to place its activities in context. Sad to say, the methods and goals of the Spanish Inquisition were par for the course in early modern Europe. Torture was applied, though far less often than one might expect, but the same could be said of tribunals and secular and religious engines of justice across the continent. People were killed, though fewer than the sensationalist accounts suggest, but the notion of despatching stubborn heretics was normal in this period and on both sides of the confessional divide. As horrible as the Spanish Inquisition undoubtedly was, the “black legend” of a uniquely vicious enterprise does not hold up to scrutiny.

For all that, it is still seen as a stain on the reputation of the monarchs who founded it: Isabella of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. This is, to an extent, understandable, because the Inquisition was certainly at its most menacing during its earliest decades. It has been calculated that three-quarters of those killed over the course of the institution’s history, which stretched all the way to 1834, perished in the first 50 years.

There is much to admire about Isabella of Castile. She was a woman who lavished patronage on arts and letters, who could balance private austerity with public appearances in posh frocks and gleaming jewels and who, so the story goes, hunted down a sizeable bear. But the founding of the Spanish Inquisition can look a lot like a blot. Why, then, did she consent to it? Politics were every bit as important as faith. When Isabella ascended to the throne in 1474, she had a chaotic past and an uncertain future to confront. The Inquisition was one very useful tool of self-assertion.

During her early years, no one really expected the daughter of John II to become queen. She had two brothers, Henry and Alfonso, ahead of her in the line of succession. The for