Inquisitive Echoes: Unveiling the Shadows of the Spanish Inquisition
In the 1470s, Spain was a nation marked by a dynamic blend of cultural, political, and economic forces. The Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, were consolidating power through strategic marriages. The marriage is known as the Iberian Union and it joined the two Spanish countries of Aragon and Castile to create most of what we know as modern day Spain. It wouldn't be until 1492 and the completion of the reconquista that Spain would have its true borders as we see them today.
Economically, Spain experienced a resurgence as maritime exploration opened new trade routes, contributing to a flourishing economy. The marriage of Isabella to Ferdinand in 1469 created a unified monarchy, fostering stability and allowing Spain to focus on expansion and exploration.
Culturally, the 1470s marked the zenith of the Spanish Renaissance, characterized by the flourishing of arts and literature. The Catholic Monarchs were patrons of the arts, supporting renowned figures like the painter Juan de Flandes and the architect Juan Guas.
Though Spain was becoming a cornerstone for Catholicism religious unity was not in its grasp and in 1478 an idea was born, an idea that would bring about such unity but would also bring some of history's most brutal and barbaric torture methods that would spill the blood of the innocent. That idea was the Spanish Inquisition.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the dark history podcast where we explore the darkest parts of human history. hope everyone is well I’m Rob your host as always. Happy New year and Welcome to season 3 episode 1, i hope you all enjoyed your Christmas and New years festivities, unlike me, I hope you didn't over indulge in Turkey, chocolate and far far to much alcohol.
Today's episode is about the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition is quite famous and has a bad reputation for torture and death but as you find in history something aren't quite what they seem, so please bear that in mind when you listen to our episode today.
The Spanish Inquisition was a judicial institution that lasted between 1478 and 1834. Its ostensible purpose was to combat heresy in Spain, but, in practice, it resulted in consolidating power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom. Its brutal methods led to widespread death and suffering. The mere words “Spanish Inquisition” struck fear into the hearts of Spaniards for more than three centuries.
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So without further ado for the first time this season please turn off those lights sit back and relax next to the fire for more dark history.
Let's start couple of centuries before the events of our story.
For centuries the Iberian peninsula had been at war with the Umayyad Caliphate. Also known as the Moors, the caliphate first invaded from North Africa through the Straits of Gibraltar.
The Moorish invasion of Spain, also known as the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, began in the early 8th century in 711. an Arab and Berber Muslim force, led by General Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and defeated the Visigothic King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete.
The Muslim forces swiftly advanced, and within a few years, they had established the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, marking the beginning of Al-Andalus, a Muslim-ruled territory in the Iberian Peninsula. Under subsequent Umayyad rule, Al-Andalus flourished culturally, economically, and scientifically, becoming a center of learning and intellectual exchange.
Cities like Cordoba became renowned for their grand mosques, palaces, and libraries, including the famous House of Wisdom. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars coexisted, contributing to a vibrant cultural atmosphere. The period of Islamic rule saw advancements in fields such as mathematics, medicine, and astronomy.
However, over time, internal conflicts among Muslim rulers and external pressures from Christian kingdoms in the north led to fragmentation within Al-Andalus. By the 11th century, the Christian Reconquista gained momentum, with notable victories like the capture of Toledo in 1085.
. The balance of power continued to shift, and by the late 15th century, the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, completed the Reconquista with the capture of Granada.
With the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella they wanted Spain became a staunchly Catholic country with staunchly Catholic monarchs, the country they had was a melting pot of different religions and that would not do.
Isabell and Ferdinand would establish The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, more commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition, in 1478. This wouldn't be the first attapet though as there had been previous Inquisitions in regions of Spain during the 13th and 14th centuries, but these lacked the force of their 15th-century successor.
Inquisitions had occurred all around
Europe in the Middle Ages, but later, there were only Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions that occurred during parts of the same time period as the Spanish Inquisition.
Compared to much of Europe, Spanish society had been fairly multi-religious. Although Muslims and Jews had never been treated as equals by Christians, Jews weren’t expelled from the territory as they had been in France and England around the turn of the 14th century, and Muslims were still tolerated after the end of the Reconquista in 1492. However, by the end of the 14th century, unrest did occur, The pogroms of 1391 were especially brutal, and the threat of violence hung over the Jewish community in Spain. Faced with the choice between baptism and death, the number of nominalconverts to the Christian faith soon became very great. During these programs Many Jews were killed. In the aftermath to be spared death and gain opportunities to gain skilled work, an estimated 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism. These were Named the conversos, or New Christians, many obtained positions in the government, Church, and even nobility.
The Inquisition was originally intended to primarily identify heretics, or those deemed by the Roman Catholic Church to hold false religious beliefs, among those who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and Islam. During the course of the Inquisition, people of other religions and even those who had committed crimes that weren’t strictly religious became victims of the Inquisition. The practice reached as far as Spanish-held territories in the Americas.
On a trip to Seville in 1477 or 1478, Queen Isabella was informed by a Dominican friar that Crypto-Judaism was transpiring in Seville. Crypto-Judaism was the act of continuing to observe the Jewish religion despite officially being a member of the Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Seville and a Dominican friar, Tomás de Torquemada, backed this statement.
These Jews had been given the name Marrano, and After Aragon and Castile were united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, the Marranos were denounced as a danger to the existence of Christian Spain.
In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull from Pope Sixtus IV to establish an inquisition in Spain. For those of you who don't know a Papal bull is a type of public decree, letters patent, or charter issued by a pope of the Catholic Church, they were more or less the popes approval for monarch or countries to start Crusades, or route out heretics in the name of God. I understand that is a very loose way to describe them but you get my drift.
Anyway Pope Sixtus IV was pressured into permitting the Spanish monarchs to control the Inquisition because Ferdinand threatened to withdraw military support when Spanish troops were needed to help protect Rome from the Ottoman Turks.
The Spanish monarchy sought to use the Inquisition to support their absolute and centralizing regime and most especially to increase royal power in Aragon.
The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, he proved so severe that Sixtus IV attempted to intervene. The Spanish crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give up, however, and the efforts of the pope to limit the powers of the Inquisition were without avail. In 1483 the Pope was induced to authorize the naming by the Spanish government of a grand inquisitor for Castile, and during that same year Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia were placed under the power of the Inquisition.
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The Spanish Inquisition held no authority over non-Christians, though it could try those who claimed they were Christians while practicing a different religion. The first group to be targeted in large numbers was Jewish conversos. One reason the Inquisition had been created was to stop conversos from observing Jewish practices. In March 1492, the Alhambra Decree gave all Jews the choice between expulsion from Spain or conversion to Catholicism. Enforcement of the Alhambra Decree was more stringent in southern and coastal regions. Of approximately 80,000 Jews and 200,000 conversos, around 40,000 emigrated.
Of the people that were left Torture was used. The methods were only used to get a confession and wasn't meant to actually punish the accused heretic for his crimes. Some inquisitors used starvation, forced the accused to consume and hold vast quantities of water or other fluids, or heaped burning coals on parts of their body. But these methods didn't always work fast enough for their liking.
The strappardo was device used to exact confessions quickly. the hands of the accused were tied behind his back and the rope looped over a brace in the ceiling of the chamber or attached to a pulley. Then the subject was raised until he was hanging from his arms. This might cause the shoulders to pull out of their sockets. Sometimes, the torturers added a series of drops, jerking the subject up and down. Weights could be added to the ankles and feet to make the hanging even more painful.
The rack was another well-known torture method associated with inquisition. The subject had his hands and feet tied or chained to rollers at one or both ends of a wooden or metal frame. The torturer turned the rollers with a handle, which pulled the chains or ropes in increments and stretched the subject's joints, often until they dislocated. If the torturer continued turning the rollers, the accused's arms and legs could be torn off. Often, simply seeing someone else being tortured on the rack was enough to make another person confess.
While the accused heretics were on strappado or the rack, inquisitors often applied other torture devices to their bodies. These included heated metal pincers, thumbscrews, boots, or other devices designed to burn, pinch or otherwise mutilate their hands, feet or bodily orifices.
Burning at the stake was a common method of both torture and execution used during the Spanish Inquisition. It was a particularly brutal and inhumane method of punishment, as the victims were tied to a wooden stake and set on fire, often in public spaces, and left to suffer until they died.
Just one decade after the Inquisition began, historian Hernando del Pulgar estimated that 2,000 people had been burned at the stake.
The Inquisitors used burning at the stake as a way to publicly display the punishment for heresy, as a warning to others not to oppose the Catholic Church. The victims were often paraded through the streets before being tied to the stake and set on fire.
Conversos of Jewish origin weren’t the only ones who became victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Ferdinand and Isabella had gained control of Granada, the last part of Spain to be ruled over by Muslims, in 1492. In 1502, a royal decree gave Muslims in Granada the stark choice between expulsion or conversion. The Revolt of the Brotherhoods, which took place between 1519 and 1523 in Aragon, was an anti-monarchist and anti-feudal movement that also had anti-Islamic elements. Muslim conversos, known as moriscos, in Aragon were given the choice of expulsion or conversion as a result of the Revolt of the Brotherhoods.
Although Muslims had generally integrated with their Catholic neighbors more so than their Jewish counterparts, tensions between Old Christians and moriscos worsened in the second half of the 16th century. From 1570, cases against moriscos became the predominant cases of the Spanish Inquisition in Zaragoza, Valencia, and Granada. Even so, moriscos weren’t treated as badly overall as Jewish conversos and Protestants. Between 1609 and 1614, the Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain saw hundreds of thousands of moriscos leave Spain. Some of those who stayed or returned found themselves pursued by the Inquisition, although not to the same extent as the Jewish conversos.
In addition to Jewish and Muslim conversos, Protestant and Anglican Christians were also pursued by the Spanish Inquisition. Because there were few Protestants in Spain, the numbers who were persecuted were relatively low. The first trials, around 120 of them, against those called Lutherans took place between 1558 and 1562. Approximately 100 Protestants were executed. More Spaniards were accused of being Protestants towards the end of the century, although many of them weren’t of the Protestant religion. The accusations against “Lutherans” were often used to identify agents of foreign powers and those disloyal to the Spanish Crown’s political power. Rather than religious practices, blasphemy, disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days were taken as signs of heresy. Because Spain never went to war against Christian Orthodox countries, the Spanish Inquisition virtually never investigated Orthodox Christians.
The inquisitor more or less became the unofficial police of Spain. By this point anything from Bigamy, blasphemy and sodomy to bestiality smuggling, forgery of money and tax fraud fell under the jurisdiction of the inquisitor.
the distinction between religious and non-religious crimes didn’t exist as it does today. Counterfeiting money and heretic proselytism were treated similarly because both were “spreading falsifications.” Public blasphemers and street con artists were both considered to be misleading the public in a harmful way. The Spanish Inquisition’s religious and secular activity also overlapped on occasion. Someone who was being investigated for heresy related to a foreign authority might also find themselves investigated for espionage.
The Spanish Inquisition also used censorship as a way to limit the spread of heretical ideas. First compiled in other parts of Europe, the Spanish Inquisition published its first Index of banned books in 1551. Many of the books that were prohibited or heavily restricted were religious or great works of Spanish literature. Rather than banning books in their entirety, sometimes passages, lines, or even individual words were expurgated, but the book remained in circulation. Some books that were placed on the Index were later removed while other books that had been freely available were later blacklisted. This censorship proved largely ineffective as scholars and the elite maintained access to these books.
By the turn of the 19th century, the Spanish state began to take a more active role in the welfare of the public, and ideas endorsed by the thinkers of the Enlightenment were better protected by the Crown. During the Napoleonic era, when Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte was King of Spain from 1808 to 1813, the Inquisition was abolished. The Spanish Inquisition was reinstated when King Ferdinand VII assumed the Spanish throne in 1814, but over the next two decades, it was abolished and then brought back again. The last person to be sentenced to death in the Spanish Inquisition was executed in 1826. On July 15, 1834, Ferdinand VII’s widow Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, who was acting as regent to the three-year-old Queen of Spain, Isabella II, signed a Royal Decree formally ending the Spanish Inquisition.
Modern historians estimate that in more than 350 years, some 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offenses under the Spanish Inquisition, and between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed. While numerous historical records of the Spanish Inquisition exist today, there is no comprehensive record that covers all the regions of Spain for more than three centuries.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this long and dark episode.
So the Spanish Inquisition, on researching this topic the words Not so bad came up quite a lot, now don't get me wrong the torture and execution of people over religious beliefs seems pretty bad but Europe at the time was at a massive preserpice. The Ottomans were trying to conquer and in turn, spread Islam in the East, the moors has held more or less the entriaratiy of the Iberian peninsula in the West, Judaism was held in pockets all around the contenant and cathlosims was beginning to fragment with the forming of the Anglican Church and then the Protestant Reformation. There had been countless different inquisitions all over Europe and the Spanish Inquisition has the most famous and the worst reputation but The bad reputation of the Spanish Inquisition was mainly due to the Black Legend, created first by the Dutch and later by the English and other Protestants. It was basically anti-Spanish propaganda, which distorted what the Spanish Inquisition actually did. The Inquisition lasted for 356 years and killed between 3,000–5,000…total. That’s an average of 8–14 people per year, in the entire Spanish Empire. For perspective, the US executed 24 people in 2023.
The Spanish Inquisition was created by the Catholic Kings in order to secure their kingdom from subversion by Jewish and Muslim minorities. The Spanish authorities were understandably concerned about what would happen if the Muslims invaded Spain again with thousands of crypto Jews and Muslims as a possible fifth column. Before in 711 AD the Jews helped the Muslims conquer southern Iberia and during the 15th century many Jewish and Muslim converts would have helped a Turkish invasion again.
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