The Inquisition

In the early thirteenth century, the papacy faced popular religious movements it judged heretical, above all the Cathars of southern France. After the Albigensian Crusade, Pope Gregory IX began in the 1230s to commission inquisitors, mostly Dominican and Franciscan friars, to travel through affected regions. The word comes from the Latin inquisitio, an inquiry. These medieval inquisitors summoned communities, heard confessions and denunciations, and kept careful registers. They were not a single central office but individual judges with papal authority.

The Spanish Inquisition was different. In 1478 Pope Sixtus IV allowed Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to appoint their own inquisitors, and the institution that followed answered largely to the crown. Its first target was the conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under pressure after the riots of 1391, and their descendants. Many Old Christians suspected them of practising Judaism in secret. After 1492, when Spain expelled Jews who refused baptism, the number of converts grew. Later the tribunals turned to the moriscos, converts from Islam, to Protestants, and to offences such as blasphemy and bigamy.

Many of the accused were people of ordinary means: shopkeepers, artisans, physicians and their wives, whose neighbours reported that they changed their linen on Saturdays, avoided pork or lit candles on Friday evenings. Some of these were practising Judaism in secret, often at great risk; others were sincere Christians who had kept family customs without religious meaning, or who were denounced by rivals. The tribunals’ records preserve their testimony, and through them historians can hear the voices of women and men who tried to hold on to an inherited identity under pressure.

Portugal followed in 1536, and its Inquisition pursued converts from Judaism with special intensity, with a tribunal in Goa from 1560. In 1542 Pope Paul III created the Roman Inquisition to counter Protestant ideas in Italy. It was run by a congregation of cardinals and became known as the Holy Office.

Inquisitorial procedure was secret. A tribunal arriving in a town would often announce an edict of grace, inviting people to confess or to denounce others. The accused were usually not told who had testified against them, and could spend months or years in prison while the case proceeded. Torture was allowed under rules that restricted when and how long it could be used, and was intended to obtain a confession that had to be repeated freely afterwards. The surviving records show it was used in a minority of cases.

Sentences ranged widely. Many people were reconciled with penances, such as wearing a penitential garment called a sanbenito, which was later hung in the parish church as a lasting mark of shame for the family. Others received fines, confiscation of property, exile, service in the galleys or prison. Those judged unrepentant or relapsed heretics were ‘relaxed’ to the secular arm, meaning handed to civil authorities for execution, usually by burning.

The auto-da-fé, ‘act of faith’ in Portuguese, was the public ceremony where sentences were read. It could involve processions, sermons and the presence of royalty, as at the great auto held in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor in 1680. Its purpose was to display the Church’s authority and the reconciliation of penitents. Executions took place afterwards, outside the ceremony itself, though in the popular imagination the two became one.

For centuries the Inquisition’s reputation was shaped by its enemies. Protestant writers in the Netherlands and England painted Spain as a land of fanatic cruelty, and in 1817–1818 the former inquisition official Juan Antonio Llorente published a history claiming more than 30,000 people burned in person. Such figures were repeated for generations.

From the 1970s historians began systematically counting the surviving trial summaries. Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras analysed some 44,000 cases from 1540 to 1700 and found that fewer than 2% ended in execution in person. Most scholars now estimate around 3,000–5,000 executions over the Spanish Inquisition’s whole history, with the heaviest toll among conversos in its first decades. The Portuguese Inquisition executed somewhat over a thousand people, and the Roman Inquisition far fewer, though it shaped Italian intellectual life through censorship and the Index of Prohibited Books.

Historians such as Henry Kamen, who popularised this revision, stress that lower numbers do not make the tribunals harmless. Thousands lost their lives, tens of thousands lost property and honour, and whole communities lived under suspicion. The Inquisition also enforced ideas of ‘purity of blood’ that excluded descendants of Jews and Muslims from many offices for generations.

The Inquisitions declined in the eighteenth century as Enlightenment criticism grew and states took over more of their functions. Portugal abolished its tribunal in 1821. In Spain the Inquisition was abolished by decree of Napoleon in 1808 and by the liberal Cortes of Cádiz in 1813, restored in 1814, and finally abolished in 1834. The Roman Holy Office continued as a doctrinal body; in 1965 it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and in 2022 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In 1998 the Vatican opened the archives of the Holy Office to scholars, and a symposium of historians examined the record. On 12 March 2000 Pope John Paul II led a liturgy asking forgiveness for sins committed by Christians, including the use of intolerance and violence in the service of truth. Spain and Portugal have since taken steps to acknowledge the descendants of the Jews expelled in the fifteenth century.

Opposition existed at the time as well. In the fifteenth century some churchmen, including converts, protested that the new tribunals treated sincere Christians as suspects because of their ancestry. Several popes received appeals from conversos and at times tried to restrain the Spanish inquisitors, with limited success. Within Spain, towns and regional parliaments complained about confiscations and secrecy, and in 1485 the inquisitor Pedro Arbués was murdered in Zaragoza, an act that led to harsh reprisals. These conflicts remind historians that the Inquisition was never simply accepted; it was argued over from the beginning.

The Inquisition remains a powerful symbol of religious coercion. Historians now aim to see it neither through the black legend of Protestant polemic nor through defensive apology, but as a set of courts with real procedures, real limits and real victims.