Spanish Inquisition
Heather Delaria:
Saint Dominic (1170 – August 6, 1221) Presiding over an Auto-da-fe, by Pedro Berruguete, (1450 - 1504). The first Spanish auto de fe was held 1481, and St Dominic died in 1221.
The Spanish Inquisition was an institution that had precedents in other Inquisitions. The reconquest of Spain from the Moors resulted in a relatively peaceful multi-religious society, but violent antisemitic and anti-Islamic persecution ensued and many Jews and Muslims converted to the Catholic faith or fled.
Heather Delaria:
Murder of the Gran Inquisitor Pedro de Arbués by the woman he has wronged.
Source Les Mystères de l'Inquisition from Victor Féréal
Date 1844
Author R.D.E. Moraine
Some of these conversos were suspected of not being sincere converts. The Alhambra Decree in 1492 ordered all remaining Jews to leave their kingdoms, causing more Jews to convert to Christianity rather than leave Spain. Various motives have been proposed for the monarchs to start the Inquisition, such as increased political authority, weakening opposition, doing away with conversos and sheer profit.
Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured pope Sixtus IV to agree to let him set up an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome. Sixtus IV later accused the Spanish inquisition of being overzealous, accused the monarchs for being greedy and issued a bull to stop it, but he was pressured into withdrawing the bull. On both occasions Sixtus IV went along with Ferdinand II of Aragon.
During the 16th century a new target was found: Protestants. About 100 were burned as heretics. An index of prohibited books was drawn up that were alleged to contain heresy. In time converts from Islam, called Moriscos, were also persecuted by the Holy Office. Other crimes were also taken up in these tribunals such as blasphemy, Superstitions, heretical propositions, Sodomy, Bigamy and solicitation. Among superstitions, six witches can be positively verified to have been executed.
The Spanish Inquisition was an institution at the service of the monarchy, but had to follow procedures set up by the Holy See, and the appointment of Inquisitor General had to be approved by the pope. Most of the inquisitors had a university education in law. Its income came from the confiscations and otherwise operated in conformity with Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church. The procedures would start with Edicts of Grace, where people were invited to step forward to confess heresy freely and to denounce others. Denunciations were followed by detentions, which in some cases lasted up to two years before the trial. A defense counsel was assigned to the defendant, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage him or her to speak the truth. A Notary of the Secreto 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. The percentage of cases where torture was used, which was as a means of getting confessions, varied. Sentences varied from fines to execution and those condemned had to participate in the ceremony of auto de fe. The arrival of the Enlightenment in Spain in the first half of the 18th century slowed inquisitorial activity and it was definitively abolished on July 15, 1834. From 1476 to 1834 probably between 3,000 and 5,000 people were executed.
In the mid-16th century to the mid-17th century, a time when Europe was torn apart by Catholic-Protestant strife, there began to appear from the pens of various European Protestant intellectuals, who generally had minimal or no direct access or experience of the Inquisition, what has come to be known as the Black Legend, as part of the Protestant polemic in support of the Reformation. With the gradual ebbing of religious hostilities professional historians began investigations, giving a detailed, nuanced and less exaggerated picture of the Inquisition.
Heather Delaria:
The Auto de fe of Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide, or Optimism
Source Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Paris : Sirène) 1759
Date 18th-Century
Author Unknown
An Inquisition was created through the papal bull Ad Abolendam, issued at the end of the 12th century by Pope Lucius III as a way to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France. There were a 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 of Pope Gregory IX, in 1232, during the era of the Albigensian heresy. Its principal representative was Raimundo de Peñafort. With time, its importance was diluted, and, by the middle of the 15th century, it was almost forgotten although still there according to the law.
There was never a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition in Castile. Members of the episcopate were charged with surveillance of the faithful and punishment of transgressors. However, in Castile during the Middle Ages, little attention was paid to heresy.
Heather Delaria:
This picture represents a scene in which a Native American is going to be burned by a Christian priest and a crowd of European settlers.
Source Original version available on Photobucket
Date 2007
Author Wernerswollen
The Spanish Inquisition was motivated in part by the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors (Muslims). Much of the Iberian Peninsula was dominated by Moors following their invasion of the peninsula in 711 until they were expelled by means of a long campaign of reconquest. However, the reconquest did not result in the full expulsion of Muslims from Spain, but instead yielded a multi-religious society made up of Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Granada to the south, in particular remained under Moorish control until 1492, and large cities, especially Seville, Valladolid, and Barcelona, had large Jewish populations centred in Juderías.
The reconquest produced a relatively peaceful co-existence - although not without periodic conflicts - among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the peninsula's kingdoms. There was a long tradition of Jewish service to the crown of Aragon. Ferdinand's father John II named the Jewish Abiathar Crescas to be Court Astronomer. Jews occupied many important posts, religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi.
Nevertheless, in some parts of Spain towards the end of the 14th century, there was a wave of anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching of Ferrant Martinez, Archdeacon of Ecija. The pogroms of June 1391 were especially bloody: in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of people killed was equally high in other cities, such as Cordoba, Valencia and Barcelona.
One of the consequences of these disturbances was the mass conversion of Jews. Before this date, conversions were rare and tended to be motivated more for social rather than religious reasons.[citation needed] But from the 15th century, a new social group appeared: conversos, also called New Christians, who were distrusted by Jews and Christians alike for their religious beliefs. By converting, Jews could not only escape eventual persecution, but also obtain entry into many offices and posts that were being prohibited to Jews through new, more severe regulations. But converting was a hard long process involving many crucial steps and could not be done overnight. Many conversos attained important positions in 15th century Spain. Among many others, physicians Andrés Laguna and Francisco Lopez Villalobos (Ferdinand's court physician), writers Juan del Enzina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia, and bankers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez (who financed the voyage of Christopher Colombus) 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 that virtually all of the nobles of Spain were descended from Jews.
Heather Delaria:
Motives for instituting the Spanish Inquisition
Historians differ about Ferdinand and Isabella's motives for introducing the Inquisition into Spain. A number of possible reasons have been suggested:
1. To establish political and religious homogeneity. The Inquisition allowed the monarchy to intervene actively in religious affairs, without the interference of the Pope. At the same time, Ferdinand and Isabella's objective was the creation of an efficient state machinery; thus one of their priorities was to achieve religious unity to promote more centralized political authority.
2. To weaken local political opposition to the Catholic monarchs. Strengthening centralized political authority also entailed weakening local political opposition. Resistance to the installation of the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragon, for example, was often couched in terms of local legal privileges (fueros).
3. Out of fear. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901 (Vol XI, p.485) states that, "It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or through their correligionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain." Whether real or imagined there was a great fear among 15th Century Spaniards that they had a Fifth column living among them.
4. To do away with the powerful converso minority. Many members of influential families such as the Santa Fés, the Santangels, the Caballerias and the Sanchezes, were prosecuted in the Kingdom of Aragon. However the King of Aragon, Ferdinand, continued to employ many conversos in his administration.
5. Profit. The property of people found guilty by the Inquisition was confiscated. Sixtus IV openly accused the monarchs of this sin.
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