The Spanish Inquisition

Thousands of Jews and Muslims had settled in Spain. To take part in business and government, many of them had been forced to convert to Christianity. In fact, the converts, or conversos in Spanish, made up a large part of the wealthy and influential class of Spain. This produced jealousy and anti-Semitic prejudice in many Spaniards. In the 1400s, rumors spread that most conversos continued to practice their Jewish beliefs. Anti-converso riots erupted in Toledo and other cities.

By the late 1400s, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille had united all of Spain into a single kingdom. But the rioting was upsetting their unified kingdom. The king and queen decided to act. Instead of attacking the rioters who were causing religious bigotry, however, they decided to attack the conversos. Pope Sixtus IV gave the Spanish rulers permission to set up their own Inquisition. In Spain, the search for heretics was to be controlled by the crown, not the pope.

In 1483, Isabella and Ferdinand established a council to direct the activities of the Inquisition throughout Spain. They appointed Tomas de Torquemada inquisitor-general. He was a Dominican friar who had preached for years against the conversos.

The Inquisition in Spain was ferocious in dealing with heretics, especially in the early years under Torquemada. In 1485, after conversos assassinated an inquisitor, the full fury of the Spanish Inquisition was unleashed. Within 10 years, over 2,000 people had been burned at the stake, with another 15,000 suffering other penalties.

An Auto-da-fe

The final public ceremony of the Spanish Inquisition was called an auto-da-fe, which means an act of faith. Crowds would gather in a public square, often facing a cathedral. In the center of the square, there were a dozen wooden stakes where the heretics were to be burned.

A bishop came out and shouted out the names of the condemned. Then the heretics were led out, wearing black robes decorated with red demons and flames. Officials of the government tied them to the stake.

"Do you give up your heresy against the holy church?" a priest would challenge.

Anyone who repented would be strangled to death before the fires were lit. Most, however, stood silent or defiant. The fires were lit, and the square echoed with the screams of the heretics and cheers from the crowd.

The Spanish Inquisition Comes to an End

In 1492, the same year that Columbus discovered the New World for Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand expelled from their country all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. These attacks and expulsions against Spanish Jews paralyzed all of Spanish commerce. A hundred years later, the same resentment and fury turned against the Muslim population. Spain never recovered as a commercial power.

In northern Europe, the pope tried to use the Inquisition against the growing Protestant movement of the 1500s, but the Protestants were much too strong. They were allied to the leaders of powerful commercial nations and city-states. The new Protestant religions were protected by British, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Swiss governments. A single Europe had come apart.

The Inquisition had begun in a Europe united by religion as an attack on a few sects of heretics. Three hundred years later, the Inquisition could no longer hold Europe together. Religious and national wars were to last centuries and take hundreds of thousands of lives.

Today the Roman Catholic Church still wants its members to follow church doctrine, but it punishes dissenters with nothing more severe than official excommunication -- and even that does not occur very often. The church has had to reconsider its past actions. In recent times, Pope John Paul II had a church commission review what was perhaps its best known Inquisition case. The commission decided that the church was wrong when it punished Galileo in 1633 for declaring that the Earth was not the center of the universe."

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