What Was the Inquisition? A Court for Belief, Not One Institution

Grouping them together is the first mistake, so it helps to keep them apart:

• •The medieval inquisition, established from the 1230s by papal appointment, mostly staffed by Dominican and Franciscan friars, and directed initially at the Cathars of southern France and later at other movements declared heretical
• •The Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478 at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella and answerable to the Spanish crown rather than to Rome, which is its defining feature, and which targeted conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity, suspected of secretly keeping their old faith
• •The Portuguese Inquisition, established in 1536 on the Spanish model and extended to Goa, where it operated against local converts
• •The Roman Inquisition, created in 1542 as a response to the Protestant Reformation, which handled the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and which managed the index of prohibited books
• •Each had its own archives, its own procedures and its own relationship to secular power, and the Spanish and Roman bodies were institutional rivals rather than branches of one system

The word inquisition names a legal method before it names an institution. Ordinary medieval procedure was accusatorial, meaning a private accuser brought a case and risked punishment if it failed, which made prosecution rare. Inquisitorial procedure allowed a court to open an investigation on rumour or its own knowledge, gather evidence, question witnesses and reach a verdict, with the same body investigating and judging. Applied to heresy, an inquisitor arriving in a district would typically preach and announce a period of grace during which anyone could confess voluntarily and receive a light penance, which generated both confessions and denunciations. Roman-canon law required either two eyewitnesses or a confession for a conviction, and since nobody witnesses a belief, the system was structurally driven towards obtaining confessions, which is the pressure that produced the use of torture. The accused was not told who had denounced them, could not usually have a lawyer, and faced a court that had already decided the offence existed and was determining only whether this person had committed it.

The Spanish Inquisition kept meticulous records, and since historians gained systematic access to them from the 1970s the numbers have been revised sharply downward from the figures that circulated for centuries. The work of Gustav Henningsen, Jaime Contreras and others on the surviving relaciones de causas indicates roughly 150,000 trials over three and a half centuries, with executions in the range of three to five thousand, around two percent of cases, and the large majority of those in the intense first fifty years. Torture was used in a minority of cases, was subject to procedural limits including time restrictions and the requirement that a confession be freely repeated afterwards to count, and was applied less frequently than in contemporary secular courts, which is a low bar rather than a defence. Most sentences were penances, fines, public humiliation, confiscation of property or terms in the galleys, and confiscation gave the tribunal a financial interest in convictions that historians consider a genuine distorting pressure.

The lurid popular image derives substantially from the leyenda negra, a body of anti-Spanish propaganda produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Protestant Dutch and English writers during a period of war with Spain, which exaggerated numbers, invented instruments and presented the tribunal as uniquely monstrous in an era of routine judicial cruelty. Revisionist scholarship has corrected the arithmetic and created its own risk, since a lower death toll is not an acquittal. The Spanish tribunal operated for over three hundred years as an instrument of enforced religious conformity, censored what could be printed and read, ruined families through confiscation, made denunciation by neighbours a routine civic act, and applied the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, which converted a religious test into a hereditary one and excluded descendants of Jews and Muslims from offices and universities regardless of their own beliefs. That is a system of institutionalised suspicion, and its damage is not measured by execution counts.

The tribunals declined slowly as their functions became politically inconvenient and intellectually indefensible. The Portuguese Inquisition was curtailed in the eighteenth century under the reforming minister Pombal, the Spanish body was abolished by Napoleonic decree in 1808, restored, abolished again, and finally suppressed in 1834, by which point it had been executing almost nobody for decades. The Roman Inquisition survived under new names, becoming the Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908 and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965, which continues as a department of the Catholic Church concerned with doctrine and which has no coercive power. Its archives were opened to researchers in 1998, and a papal apology for the historical treatment of heretics and others was issued in 2000. The index of prohibited books, which at various points listed Galileo, Descartes, Hume, Voltaire and Kant, was formally abolished in 1966.

There were several inquisitions, not one: the medieval papal tribunals from the 1230s, the Spanish body founded in 1478 and controlled by the crown rather than Rome, the Portuguese equivalent, and the Roman Inquisition of 1542. The word names a legal procedure in which a court investigates on its own initiative, which applied to belief pushed relentlessly towards extracting confessions. Spanish archives indicate about 150,000 trials and three to five thousand executions, far fewer than the propaganda claimed, within a system whose real harm was enforced conformity and hereditary suspicion.