La Inquisición española fue un tribunal moderado en su época

En la propaganda isabelina y protestante, el Imperio español figuraba como una amenaza para todo lo que era bueno en el mundo

A familiar reaction is to accuse someone of behaving like the Spanish Inquisition. As a rhetorical device, it works well. It carries overtones of a thought police, of a tyranny over mind and soul. It conjures up images of dank cellars and sinister monks with red-hot pokers. It is a byword for oppression and abuse dressed up as law.

Yet while any reasonable person would find a lot not to like about the Spanish Inquisition, much of our popular conception of it is the product of Elizabethan propaganda and gothic fiction. There was a concerted effort by northern (mostly Protestant) European kingdoms to paint the Spanish Empire as constitutionally evil; not just a political, religious, and military rival but an existential threat to all that was good in the world. The Inquisition was the poster child for these efforts, which collectively became known as the Black Legend. Julián Juderías, Jose Alvarez-Juno, and other 20th-century historians have done much to unwind the more cartoonish allegations and understand them as the propaganda campaign they were.

In fact, examined simply as a functioning court, the Spanish Inquisition was in many ways ahead of its time and a pioneer of many judicial practices we now take for granted.

Let’s start with the basic legal concept of an “inquisition.” It just means a court of inquiry in which the judges take the lead in directing proceedings in the pursuit of truth, rather than a prosecution-driven adversarial system. Such courts continue to function in many secular jurisdictions today, and there is, frankly, nothing very sinister about it, though it appears alien to those of us raised on American courtroom dramas.

Because it was a religious court primarily concerned with heresy trials, it has the reputation of being an ecclesiastical thought police run by religious fanatics who trapped innocent laymen with theological technicalities. The Inquisition was actually a reluctant creation of the Church.

When Pope Sixtus IV granted the Spanish Crown the power to erect the Inquisition in 1478, he was responding to a situation in which Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly unified Kingdom of Spain was seeking to impose cultural and religious uniformity on its people. This was the time of the Reconquista; religion and nationalism were inseparable, and the abuses were terrible. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled any Spanish Jew who would not convert to Christianity. Despite a measure of religious freedom promised in the Treaty of Granada (1491), which saw the end of the last emirate on the peninsula, Islam was effectively outlawed. Pogroms and riots were a part of country life. Those who did convert, especially from the Jewish community, lived in fear of denunciation as “secret Jews” and could have their property seized and their lives ruined. The pope hoped, perhaps naïvely, that by getting directly involved, the Church could bring the situation under control and end the frenzied religious denunciations.

Instead, while it did stop the pogroms, the religious authority of the Church was hijacked by the Crown. It took some years before the Church could wrest back control.

Although the institution lasted for centuries, the worst excesses of the Inquisition occurred in these first 30 years, when the Spanish Crown did use it as a means of control and oppression. By 1482, Pope Sixtus had publicly regretted allowing the Inquisition to be set up under state supervision. But the procedures the Inquisition developed to counter its own abuse came to outshine those of any comparable court of the time.

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