Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History

The expulsion of the Jews may be considered the supreme and crowning work of Torquemada’s life. It marks the high meridian of his achievement. Hereafter his career dwindles grad...

The first manual for the use of inquisitors was probably written somewhere about 1320. It was the work of the Dominican friar Bernard Gui--“Practica Inquisitionis Heretice Pravi...

The Fiscal, D. Alonso de Guevára, announces to their Reverend Paternities that his denunciation of Yucé Franco is prepared, and he solicits them to order the prisoner to be brou...

Llorente agrees with the earlier writers on the subject in considering the Spanish Inquisition as an institution distinct from that which had been established to deal with the A...

The comparatively light sentences imposed upon those who came forward to abjure heresies which they were suspected of harbouring, and upon those who submitted to canonical purga...

There is no difficulty in believing Llorente’s statement--based upon extracts from contemporary chronicles--to the effect that the Inquisition was not looked upon with favour in...

You have seen the Catholic Sovereigns instilling order into that distracted land of Spain, enforcing submissiveness to the law, instituting a system of police for the repression...

No complete notion of the jurisprudence of the Holy Office can be formed without taking a glance at this tribunal at work and observing the methods upon which it proceeded in it...

It might now be said that, thanks to the patient efforts which the inquisitors themselves have been exerting for close upon a year, the prosecutor is at last furnished with the...

The stern purpose of the inquisitors and the severity with which they intended to proceed were plainly revealed by that edict of January 2, 1481. The harsh injustice that lay in...

It is not difficult to conjecture with what fresh energies the court--armed with such information as it now possessed--proceeded to re-examine the other seven prisoners accused...

During that first year of the Inquisition’s establishment in Toledo, twenty-seven persons there convicted of Judaizing were burnt and 3,300 were penanced. And what was taking pl...

Even as recently as 1474, when Pope Sixtus IV had ordered the Dominicans to set up the Inquisition in Spain, and whilst in obedience to that command inquisitors were appointed i...

The contrast between the condition thus enjoined by the Founder of Christianity and the worldly position occupied by His Vicar on earth was now fast approaching the climax which...

In May or June of 1490--the time of year being approximately determined by the events that follow--a baptized Jew of Las Mesuras named Benito Garcia put up at an inn in the nort...

The extravagant story related by Martinez Moreno, the parish priest of La Guardia, in his little book on the Santo Niño, is derived, as we have said, partly from the “Testimonio...

It was, as we have already suggested, the very opportuneness with which the trial and sentence of those concerned in the affair of La Guardia came to afford Torquemada an additi...

In an endeavour to trace the Inquisition to its source it is not necessary to go as far back into antiquity as went Paramo; nor yet is it possible to agree with him that God Him...

The evidence given by Yucé Franco as to whence the consecrated wafers had been obtained is hearsay evidence, and very vague even then. But it would appear that from Benito Garci...

If ever a name held the omen of a man’s life, that name is Torquemada. To such an extraordinary degree is it instinct with the suggestion of the machinery of fire and torture ov...

It was solemnly declared in the edict of expulsion that this decree was promulgated solely in obedience to the pressing need to cut off at the roots, once for all time, the evil...

The inquisitors could not proceed to employ the question--as the torture was euphemistically called--save under certain circumstances prescribed by law; and the strict letter of...

The Inquisition of Toledo had now to deal with heretics who must be considered impenitent, since they had not availed themselves of the benign leniency of the Church and spontan...

The Sovereigns appear to have submitted without protest to this papal interference and to the revocation of the faculty bestowed upon them of nominating the inquisitors in their...

Llorente, the historian of the Spanish Inquisition, and M. Fidel Fita, the distinguished contributor to the “Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia,” both had access to and...

For some seven centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire persecutions for heresy were very rare and very slight. This, however, cannot be attributed to mercy. Although some o...

The intrepid but ineffectual resistance offered by Zaragoza to the Inquisition was emulated by the principal cities of Aragon; one and all protested against the institution of t...