Spanish Inquisition | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica

The Inquisition at its peak

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The grand inquisitor acted as the head of the Inquisition in Spain. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction that he had received from the Vatican empowered him to name deputies and hear appeals. In deciding appeals, the grand inquisitor was assisted by a council of five members and by consultors. All those offices were filled by agreement between the government and the grand inquisitor. The council, especially after its reorganization during the reign of Philip II (1556–98), put the effective control of the institution more and more into the hands of the civil power. After the papacy of Clement VII (1523–34), priests and bishops were at times judged by the Inquisition. In procedure the Spanish Inquisition was much like the medieval inquisition. The first grand inquisitor in Spain was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada; his name became synonymous with the brutality and fanaticism associated with the Inquisition. Torquemada used torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims, and his methods were the product of a time when judicial procedure was cruel by design. The sentencing of the accused took place at the auto-da-fé (Portuguese: “act of faith”), an elaborate public expression of the Inquisition’s power. The condemned were presented before a large crowd that often included royalty, and the proceedings had a ritualized, almost festive, quality. The number of burnings at the stake during Torquemada’s tenure was exaggerated by Protestant critics of the Inquisition, but it is generally estimated to have been about 2,000.

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At Torquemada’s urging, Ferdinand and Isabella issued an edict on March 31, 1492, giving Spanish Jews the choice of exile or baptism; as a result, more than 160,000 Jews were expelled from Spain. Francisco, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, promoted the suppression of Muslims with the same zeal that Torquemada had directed at Jews. In 1502 he ordered the proscription of Islam in Granada, the last of the Muslim kingdoms in Spain to fall to the Reconquista. The persecution of Muslims accelerated in 1507 when Jiménez was named grand inquisitor. Muslims in Valencia and Aragon were subjected to forced conversion in 1526, and Islam was subsequently banned in Spain. The Inquisition then devoted its attention to the Moriscos, Spanish Muslims who had previously accepted baptism. Expressions of Morisco culture were forbidden by Philip II in 1566, and within three years, persecution by the Inquisition gave way to open warfare between the Moriscos and the Spanish crown. The Moriscos were driven from Granada in 1571, and by 1614 some 300,000 had been expelled from Spain entirely.

When the Reformation began to penetrate into Spain, the relatively few Spanish Protestants were eliminated by the Inquisition. Foreigners suspected of promoting Protestant faiths within Spain met similarly violent ends. Having largely purged the country of Jews and Muslims—as well as many former members of those faiths who had converted to Christianity—the Spanish Inquisition turned its attention to prominent Roman Catholics. Saint Ignatius of Loyola was twice arrested on suspicion of heresy, and the archbishop of Toledo, the Dominican Bartolomé de Carranza, was imprisoned for almost 17 years. Nominally Christian groups that diverged from the Inquisition’s orthodoxy, such as the followers of the mystical Alumbrado movement and adherents of Erasmianism (a spiritualized Christian belief system influenced by the teachings of humanist Desiderius Erasmus), were subjected to intense persecution throughout the 16th and into the 17th century.