First established in Spain in 1478 by the then King and Queen - Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile - the Inquisition was a holy office designed to root out heresy in the land. What's best to mention now is that Spain at the time was fiercely Catholic.
We're talking about a time when religion was everything - it was paramount to society and its virtue had to be defended and its morals upheld. Enter the Spanish Inquisition. (A quick note here - I keep referring to it as the Spanish Inquisition because other countries had Inquisitions, and we're talking about the Spanish one in this article. To widen it up to all of them would be much more complex.)
What did the Spanish Inquisition do?
When you think about the Spanish Inquisition, the word heretic probably comes to mind. And if you know a bit of history you might then think about protestants. But protestantism was far from a big threat. Ferdinand and Isabella felt that their Catholic lands were under threat alright - but predominantly from the Jews and the Muslims.
Spain had perhaps a higher percentage of these religious groups (particularly the Muslims, or Moors as they were known,) because of its close geographical proximity to Africa. A lot of Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity to avoid persecution and enforced exile, and if they did so they would become known as conversos (converted Jew,) or moriscos (converted muslim.) It was the monitoring of these supposed converts that the Inquisition was mostly involved with, attempting to catch out and persecute any false converts - in particular the conversos.
The Jewish people as an ethnicity were not liked or trusted at all, and they were the ones who were persecuted most. The Moriscos were, but because of strong links with the nobility the monarchy feared to rock the boat with them too much. Okay, so, job one - sniffing out false converts. Job two? Well, the Inquisition dealt with a number of different things. Sodomy, witchcraft and blasphemy were all dealt with - as well as the control of protestantism to a little degree, although that really wasn't much of an issue in Spain.
The Inquisition was also responsible for the censorship of certain books from the public domain. Basically anything that could be deemed heretical was investigated. But don't imagine that they snuck into a town at night, stealing people away. It was all very open and public, and whilst they didn't shy away from arresting those who were guilty, a big part of their job was to educate and nurture the pure faith that most people held, and to encourage them to be good Catholics.
What were the punishments?
If you were found guilty there were several options that could be give to you as a punishment. These ranged from a penance, which could be something as small as a fine, up to a very unrelaxing relaxation - which was being burnt at the stake. Torture was used but not as a punishment, its use had to be in order to extract a confession, and it had to be bloodless.
Everything apart from execution look place at a public ceremony called an auto de fe, a strange kind of festival which would involve the public, where the guilty were given their sentences. The auto de fe would involve prayers and a mass, but it wouldn't involve execution. Many painters have inaccurately portrayed these events as looking like mass bonfires in city plazas, but this just isn't true. The church couldn't be seen to kill, so any death sentence had to be handed over to civil authorities.
How was the Inquisition not so bad then?
The picture people hold of the Inquisition is mass burnings, as stated before. A kind of Nazi style secret police, murdering millions. This just isn't true. As mentioned, yes, burnings did take place, but these were carried out by the civil authorities. And let's look at the numbers. Until recent times it's all been a bit vague, just hearsay and guesses. But investigation into actual tribunal records shows that between the really active years of the Spanish Inquisition (1478 - 1730) there was probably about 4000 people executed, which if you do the sums would be one or two people a month.
Of course it didn't work out like that, the first 100 years of its service saw the most prosecutions, but it does suggest that the total isn't as high as you'd imagine. And yes, torture was used, but its use was limited. Arrest by the Inquisition didn't mean definite torture. They had some regulations on it too - that it could only be used on purely heretical cases, and it couldn't be used more than once in a case. And the key thing here with the burnings and the torture is that it certainly wasn't any worse then what any other country was doing at the time.
In England there was the horrible punishment of being hung, drawn and quartered, and Mary I was burning protestants like nobody's business. In France there was the barbaric torture of being broken on the wheel until you died. And almost every country employed torture as not only a form of extracting confession but also as a punishment - something the Spanish Inquisition didn't do. And that point of being no worse than anyone else goes for the treatment of Jews and Muslims too - they were just as poorly treated in many other parts of Europe.
Conclusion
The simple fact of the matter is that the Spanish Inquisition wasn't the terror machine it has been portrayed to be. The painters of the time have a lot to answer for, as those paintings of dozens of people being burnt alive at the auto de fe just isn't accurate, and it's an image that has tainted most of society's view of the Spanish Inquisition forever.
Their deeds may not be justified in today's world, but in the world they lived in it wasn't anything out of the ordinary - as I say, no worse than anyone else. The average Spaniard circa 1500 wouldn't be living in terror of the Inquisition, and wouldn't be jumping under the bed whenever they rode by. The were a part of life, an office working on behalf of the King and Queen trying to protect that which they believed in wholeheartedly. Whilst it might all still look a bit monstrous to us now, the Spanish Inquisition certainly isn't the historical monster it is so often (quite literally,) painted to be.
Sources
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Inquisition.html
Kamen, Henry - The Spanish Inquisition - A historical revision - 1999
Matthew Head - I'm a 22 year old Theology Graduate who is trying to make his way as a writer. I've got my own series of novels on the go, "The Chronicles ...
