The Spanish Inquisition: Difference between revisions
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NormAtredies (talk | contribs) (This page is about the Spanish Inquisition, so that paragraph is irrelevant.) |
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Some points about the actual Spanish Inquisition:
* The ''auto de fe'' was actually only [[Come to Gawk|a public penance of heretics]] and didn't actually feature [[Cold-Blooded Torture|torture]] or [[Burn the Witch|burning at the stake]] as commonly depicted -- the last part came later on. However, the two were seen as the same process.
* Historians now estimate that of all trials only two percent may have actually ended with execution. A study of the timeframe 1540 to 1700 found documents for 44,674 cases with roughly 1500 death sentences. Furthermore as trials tended to be lengthy and
* They didn't really burn books and the stuff that was on their banned list was still widely available. Most Golden Age authors ran into them at least once.
* Unusually among the multiple Inquisitions established in different parts of Europe, final authority and control rested with the monarchs rather than the Church hierarchy (even the Pope had limited influence). It quite often functioned as a simple tool of repression, a sort of medieval secret police working for the Crown. This rather ironically means you could argue it was the ''least'' religiously motivated of the Inquisitions, despite its image and reputation.
* The Holy Office of the Inquisition is now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Amongst the most recent Prefects of this office was one Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger... currently known as [[The Pope|Pope Benedict XVI]]. In fact, he was Prefect when he was elected Pope.
** Though the Holy Office per se only had direct jurisdiction over the Italian peninsula at most The Holy Office reported directly to the Pope, while the well-known Spanish office, as said above, reported to El Escorial first.
* One of the main reasons for the villain status of the Inquisition: Their host country was often at war with primarily Protestant nations such as England and the Netherlands, where printing presses and popular literature were much more common. This meant that at the beginning they criticized the Spanish Inquisition's poor job on executions and conversions. When the Inquisition became a bit harsher, they went [[Berserk Button|apeshit]] and exaggerated its reputation of being a blood-thirsty organization Some modern-day Spaniards refer to this as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_legend| "Black Legend."] Protestant criticism was mostly just propaganda against their religious opponents, each side considering the other heretics. Then,
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