48 Fun Facts About The Spanish Inquisition

Which pope authorised the Spanish Inquisition in 1478?

Sixtus IV, the pope who built the Sistine Chapel, let the Spanish crown rather than Rome name the inquisitors; when he condemned their abuses in 1482, the king made him back down.

Which two rulers, known as the "Catholic Monarchs", appointed the first Spanish inquisitors in 1480?

Ferdinand and Isabella held the pope's licence for almost two years before using it, then named two friars who began work in Andalusia within months.

Which kingdom set up its own inquisition on the Spanish model in 1536?

Portugal's king had lobbied Rome for it for years, and it pressed converts' families so hard that many later crossed into Spain to get away from it.

In which city did the Spanish Inquisition hold its first auto de fe, burning six people in 1481?

Seville held it on 6 February 1481, burning six men and women; thousands of converted families fled the city, and nobles sheltering them were ordered to give them up.

Who was the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain?

Tomás de Torquemada, the queen's confessor, made his name a byword for fanaticism; by 1494 his age and the complaints reaching Rome led the pope to appoint four assistants to share his powers.

To which religious order did the first Grand Inquisitor and most early inquisitors belong?

The Dominicans began as a Spanish priest's bid to win back French heretics by preaching rather than force; when the popes later set up inquisitions, they were handed the job.

A cold chimney on which day could get a Spanish convert denounced to the Inquisition as a secret Jew?

Saturday: Jewish law bars lighting a fire on the Sabbath, so neighbours noted cold chimneys, clean shirts and fresh tablecloths that day and reported them, unnamed, to the tribunal.

Which Edgar Allan Poe story is told by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition?

The Pit and the Pendulum has its narrator smear the last of his meat on his straps, so that rats gnaw him free as the blade swings down toward his chest.

What were Spain's Muslim converts to Christianity called?

Moriscos were promised forty years free of the Inquisition so that they could learn their new faith, and the promise was broken long before the time ran out.

The 1492 Alhambra Decree ordered the expulsion of which group?

Unconverted Jews had four months to accept baptism or go, and were barred from taking gold, silver or coin, so families sold homes and land for whatever they could carry.

Which future saint was twice jailed in Spain in the 1520s on suspicion of heresy?

Ignatius of Loyola was locked up at Alcalá and again at Salamanca for preaching without a theology degree, so he left Spain for Paris, where he gathered the companions who became his new order.

Under which ruler did Spain void the Alhambra Decree in 1968?

Francisco Franco's government declared the order void that December, a gesture that came about a century after Spain had begun to tolerate other faiths again.

What did the limpieza de sangre statutes require?

Proof of "clean" Christian ancestry meant handing in your family tree and paying for investigators to question witnesses about it; one rumoured Jewish forebear could end a career.

Which Spanish region lost about a third of its people when converts from Islam were expelled from 1609?

Valencia had lived off these farmers' rents and harvests; once they were shipped out, fields lay abandoned and the nobles who had been their landlords slid into debt.

What does "auto de fe" literally mean?

Act of faith is the literal sense, and the act was the public sentencing: the burnings took place afterwards and elsewhere, not at the ceremony the name describes.

What was the sanbenito?

A penitential garment worn by the condemned, the sanbenito was later hung in the parish church with the wearer's name on it, so that the family's disgrace outlived him.

Inquisitor Pedro de Arbués, murdered at prayer in a Spanish cathedral in 1485, had what on under his robes?

A coat of mail and a steel cap did not save him: the blow fell on his neck between the two, and the murder swung Zaragoza's crowds, until then hostile to the tribunal, behind it.

Which Inquisition decree, read after Sunday Mass, gave heretics 30 to 40 days to confess?

The Edict of Grace came with a catch: to be let off, penitents had to name everyone else they knew to be straying, so each wave of confessions supplied the next round of arrests.

The toca, a torture used by the Spanish Inquisition, was an early form of what?

Waterboarding: a strip of linen, the toca, was pushed down the prisoner's throat and water trickled through it from a jar, with the severity of a session counted in jars.

What did the Spanish Inquisition's own rules forbid its torturers to do?

Draw blood or cause permanent damage was barred by a canon-law scruple against clerics shedding blood, and a physician stood by, yet prisoners still left the chamber with crippled limbs.

What was the Spanish Inquisition's euphemism for sending a heretic to be executed?

Relaxation to the secular arm let the tribunal say it executed no one: lay magistrates lit the fire without ever seeing the trial record, and one who refused risked a heresy charge himself.

What happened to heretics the Spanish Inquisition condemned after they had died or fled?

They were burned in effigy, and the dead did not rest either: their bones were dug up and burned beside the dummy, and their heirs lost the estate, even decades later.

Which scientist was tried not by the Spanish Inquisition but by its separate Roman counterpart?

Galileo Galilei faced the Roman Inquisition, a papal body founded in 1542; Spain's tribunal answered to its own crown and was abolished, while Rome's lives on as the Vatican's doctrine office.

By modern estimates, how many people did the Spanish Inquisition execute in its 350 years?

3,000 to 5,000 is the range historians now give, most of them in the first fifty years; Europe's witch-hunts of the same centuries killed more than ten times as many.

What did the pope accuse the Inquisition in Aragon of being moved by, in an extraordinary 1482 bull?

Lust for wealth, not zeal for the faith, was the charge: the bull said true Christians were being jailed and tortured on the word of enemies and slaves, and the outraged king got it suspended.

Fray Luis de León spent almost five years in Inquisition cells after translating which biblical book into Spanish?

The Song of Songs in Spanish was held against him at his trial; freed in 1576, he returned to Salamanca, where a doubtful but much-loved tradition has him resume with "As we were saying yesterday".

The "witches" of the Basque village of Zugarramurdi were tried by which city's Inquisition tribunal in 1609 to 1610?

Logroño, in neighbouring La Rioja, held the tribunal for the whole Kingdom of Navarre, so the villagers were marched there and sentenced at a two-day auto de fe in November 1610.

Spanish inquisitors filed almost any careless remark against the Church, even a drunken joke, under which label?

Lutheran was the catch-all: to Spaniards of the time every Protestant was one, so the files greatly overstate how many real Protestants the tribunal ever found.

Under which ruler was the Spanish Inquisition first abolished, in 1808?

Joseph Bonaparte, the brother Napoleon had just put on Spain's throne, saw it suppressed in 1808; it came back in 1814 and was suppressed again in 1820, well before the final decree of 1834.

Which king restored the Spanish Inquisition in 1814, only for his widow to abolish it for good in 1834?

Ferdinand VII revived it on regaining his throne, then lost it again to the liberal revolt of 1820; the final decree came from his widow, ruling as regent for their young daughter.

Juan Antonio Llorente, who mined the Inquisition's archives for his critical 1817 history, had held what post there?

Its general secretary from 1789, he sided with the French occupiers in 1808, was set to examine the tribunal's archives, and took his findings into exile in Paris when the old king came back.

Which three American cities had tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition?

Lima, Mexico City and Cartagena could try almost anyone in the colonies except Indigenous people, whom the crown placed outside their reach as newcomers to the faith.

What was the Spanish Inquisition's ruling council, which sat under the Inquisitor General, commonly called?

The Suprema, created in 1483 to assist the Inquisitor General, ended up overshadowing him and checking the local tribunals' work in minute detail.

Francisco Rizi's huge 1683 canvas in the Prado shows an auto de fe held in which Madrid square?

Plaza Mayor was fitted with a vast timber stage for the day-long auto of 1680, held before King Charles II to mark his marriage; Rizi put the whole scene on canvas three years later.

Which king had the Inquisition bring trumped-up heresy charges against his fugitive secretary Antonio Pérez in 1591?

Philip II could not reach Pérez inside Aragon's own courts, so a heresy charge was used to move him to the Inquisition's jail; Zaragoza rose in riot and he got away to France.

In the Enlightenment, with heresy trials fading, the Spanish Inquisition turned mainly to which task?

Censoring books was most of what was left of its work, and after 1789 the crown gave it new life as a barrier against revolutionary writing from France.

What did the Inquisition's 1815 purge target, arresting people merely "suspected" of it?

Freemasonry drew a special edict in January 1815 inviting lodge members to denounce themselves, yet for all the alarm the tribunal's own records show few Masons ever brought to trial.

In Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch, what does Cardinal Ximénez first name as their chief weapon?

Surprise comes first, but he keeps remembering more (fear, ruthless efficiency, a fanatical devotion to the Pope, nice red uniforms) and has to start the count again each time.

In Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch, what kitchen item does Cardinal Biggles fetch as the instrument of torture?

A dish-drying rack is what Biggles brings when told to fetch "the rack"; the cardinals move on to poking their victim with soft cushions and sitting her in the comfy chair.

Which Dostoevsky novel contains the chapter "The Grand Inquisitor", in which Christ returns to earth and is arrested?

The Brothers Karamazov has Ivan tell the tale to his brother Alyosha as a poem of his own: the old cardinal threatens Christ with the stake, and Christ answers only with a kiss.

Which 2006 film stars Natalie Portman as a merchant's daughter arrested by the Spanish Inquisition in 1792?

Goya's Ghosts casts Javier Bardem as the friar who has her jailed and Stellan Skarsgård as Goya, the court painter she sits for, who tries to get her out.

Which opera, based on a Schiller play, puts a Grand Inquisitor and an auto de fe on stage?

Verdi's Don Carlos has the king ask the Grand Inquisitor's leave to hand over his own son; the old priest agrees, then demands the king's confidant Posa too, and the throne gives way to the altar.

Spain's first statute barring Jewish converts and their descendants from public office was passed in 1449 in which city?

Toledo's rebels under Pedro Sarmiento passed it during a revolt in 1449; the pope excommunicated its authors within a year, yet statutes like it spread across Spain all the same.

The medieval Inquisition, forerunner of Spain's, was first set up to root out which heresy in southern France?

Catharism, strong around Toulouse and Albi, outlasted a twenty-year crusade; the papal inquisition was organised in the 1230s to finish by interrogation what the armies had not.

What name is given to the anti-Spanish propaganda of Protestant Europe that shaped the Inquisition's grim reputation?

The Black Legend is the name for the hostile picture of Spain that poured from Protestant presses in the Netherlands and England during their wars with it; how far it distorts the record is still argued.

Men convicted of bigamy by the Spanish Inquisition typically spent up to five years doing what?

Rowing in the galleys, after a public flogging, was the usual sentence for an ordinary man; offenders of rank or with a profession were spared the oar and given other service instead.

Which Sicilian city housed the Spanish Inquisition's tribunal for the island?

Palermo's tribunal sat in the Palazzo Steri until it closed in 1782, and its prisoners covered the cell walls with drawings and verses that visitors can still read.

In the Spanish Inquisition, what was a "familiar"?

A lay helper of the tribunal, a familiar could carry arms and claim other privileges, perks so sought after that the crown had to cap how many each town could have.