The history of Spain is blighted by a dark and evil phase that still sends shivers down our spines — the Spanish Inquisition, which had Spain in its clutches for some 350 years.
For the supposed cause of Catholic purity, Spain was in the stranglehold of a murderous orthodoxy as thousands suffered torture and slow death. The Inquisition was an instrument of both the church and the state and was launched in 1478 during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Tomas de Torquemada, Dominican Friar and the Grand Inquisitor, the man whose name became synonymous with cruelty and persecution, presided over the Inquisition from 1483 to 1498. In order to force out confessions, victims were subjected to gruesome punishments such as strangulation, being stretched on the rack, waterboarding or put through strappado, a gruelling form of torture in which subjects were hanged by their wrists until their arms dislocated. Even today, the Inquisition generates shudders, carrying with it the whiff of burning flesh and the creaking of the rack.
The holy office of the Inquisition was charged with rooting out heresy, in other words ensuring that the whole of Spain practised only the purest form of Catholicism and no other religious belief, whether it was Judaism or the Protestant faith, could prevail. However, the Inquisition was set up basically to deal with one specific problem — the Jews, or more precisely, converted Jews whose new Catholic faith was suspected of being less than sincere.
These conversos, as Spanish Catholics called them (unconverted Jews merited the epithet marranos or swine) dated back to the horrific organised massacres of the previous century and large numbers of Jews, in order to survive, embraced Christianity more or less at swordspoint.
Their new faith freed them from the crippling restrictions which practising Jews had to endure. Freed from the shackles with which countless practising Jews had to live, the conversos used the traditional entrepreneurial spirit and resilience of the Jewish people to catapult themselves to positions of wealth and power in Spanish society.
However, there were many Jews who clung in secret to the rites of Judaism that their new persecutors were determined to stamp out.
Tribunals sprang up in all the important towns of the Iberian peninsula and heretics were invited to present themselves before the Inquisitors in repentance and were asked to denounce their unrepentant compatriots in exchange for lenient sentences.
Executions took place as the most important part of all the Inquisitions’ ceremonials — the auto da fe or the act of faith. Some involved hundreds of penitents and would generally last the entire day or even longer. For example, an auto da fe in Seville in 1660 took three days to complete and attracted 10,000 spectators .
The burning ground was later converted into a bullring. According to the sentence, the unfortunate was stripped half-naked, scourged and paraded in the streets. The whole assembly then converged at the place of burning where a last minute display of repentance often secured for the heretic the mercy of the garotte (a form of strangulation), as only the most stubborn were burnt alive.
Torquemada was the man responsible for reorganising the Inquisition and expanding its scope to include crimes like blasphemy, usury and even sorcery. Torquemada also ordered the expulsion of thousands of Jews, Muslims and blacks whom he believed would taint the spiritual purity of Spain. Those that converted to Christianity were allowed to remain but risked being tortured or executed if they tried to practise their faith in secret. Some 2,000 people were murdered during Torquemada’s reign as Grand Inquisitor, most of them beheaded or burned at the stake.
Another ‘lesser’ punishment involved using fresh, slow-burning wood so that victims would die of smoke inhalation before the flames could reach them. A deep sense of fear and foreboding pervaded the Spanish landscape, especially among the conversos.
Any innocent individual going about his business could be suddenly picked up and charged with heresy. People were petrified that any inadvertent remark or gesture would arouse the suspicions of the ever-vigilant Inquisitors.
The craze for burning social deviants gradually died out, though in Spain the so-called social deviants died out first anyway. Also extinguished in Spain was the spirit of free enquiry which had transformed the rest of Europe.
Universities dwindled, literature was stunted and politics remained fossilised as the Spanish Empire crumbled. New ideas that flooded in from revolutionary France were stymied by the Inquisition. Although Napoleon’s troops swept away this abhorrent practice in 1809, it was re-instituted by King Ferdinand in 1814.