The Spanish Inquisition Trivia
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48 free The Spanish Inquisition trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Spanish Inquisition ran for more than 350 years, and this quiz covers the whole span: the papal bull of 1478, the first burnings in Seville, Tomás de Torquemada's 28-article rulebook, the Alhambra Decree that expelled the Jews, the yellow sanbenito, the baroque spectacle of the auto de fe, the schoolteacher hanged in 1826 and the regent who finally abolished the tribunal in 1834. Easy questions ask which monarchs founded it and what the Monty Python catchphrase is; harder ones dig into the three permitted torture methods, the inquisitor nicknamed the Witches' Advocate, why Sixtus IV protested about lust for wealth, and how many people the Inquisition actually executed according to modern estimates. It suits history students, church-history buffs and quiz nights that want a round with real numbers behind the legend. Sources are cited so you can tell Black Legend myth from documented fact. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the Inquisition, its officials, its decrees and its depictions, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
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Q 01Which pope authorised the Spanish Inquisition in 1478?
Sixtus IV
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.
Q 02Which two rulers, known as the "Catholic Monarchs", appointed the first Spanish inquisitors in 1480?
Ferdinand and Isabella
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.
Q 03Which kingdom set up its own inquisition on the Spanish model in 1536?
Portugal
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.
Q 04In which city did the Spanish Inquisition hold its first auto de fe, burning six people in 1481?
Seville
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.
Q 05Who was the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain?
Tomás de Torquemada
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.
Q 06To which religious order did the first Grand Inquisitor and most early inquisitors belong?
The Dominicans
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.
Q 07A cold chimney on which day could get a Spanish convert denounced to the Inquisition as a secret Jew?
Saturday
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.
Q 08Which Edgar Allan Poe story is told by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition?
The Pit and the Pendulum
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.
Q 09What were Spain's Muslim converts to Christianity called?
Moriscos
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.
Q 10The 1492 Alhambra Decree ordered the expulsion of which group?
Unconverted Jews
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.
Q 11Which future saint was twice jailed in Spain in the 1520s on suspicion of heresy?
Ignatius of Loyola
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.
Q 12Under which ruler did Spain void the Alhambra Decree in 1968?
Francisco Franco
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.
Q 13What did the limpieza de sangre statutes require?
Proof of "clean" Christian ancestry
Q 21What was the Spanish Inquisition's euphemism for sending a heretic to be executed?
Relaxation to the secular arm
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.
Q 22What happened to heretics the Spanish Inquisition condemned after they had died or fled?
They were burned in effigy
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.
Q 23Which scientist was tried not by the Spanish Inquisition but by its separate Roman counterpart?
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.
Q 14Which Spanish region lost about a third of its people when converts from Islam were expelled from 1609?
Valencia
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.
Q 15What does "auto de fe" literally mean?
Act of faith
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.
Q 16What was the sanbenito?
A penitential garment worn by the condemned
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.
Q 17Inquisitor Pedro de Arbués, murdered at prayer in a Spanish cathedral in 1485, had what on under his robes?
A coat of mail
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.
Q 18Which Inquisition decree, read after Sunday Mass, gave heretics 30 to 40 days to confess?
The Edict of Grace
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.
Q 19The toca, a torture used by the Spanish Inquisition, was an early form of what?
Waterboarding
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.
Q 20What did the Spanish Inquisition's own rules forbid its torturers to do?
Draw blood or cause permanent damage
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.
Galileo Galilei
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.
Q 24By modern estimates, how many people did the Spanish Inquisition execute in its 350 years?
3,000 to 5,000
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.
Q 25What did the pope accuse the Inquisition in Aragon of being moved by, in an extraordinary 1482 bull?
Lust for wealth
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.
Q 26Fray Luis de León spent almost five years in Inquisition cells after translating which biblical book into Spanish?
The Song of Songs
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".
Q 27The "witches" of the Basque village of Zugarramurdi were tried by which city's Inquisition tribunal in 1609 to 1610?
Logroño
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.
Q 28Spanish inquisitors filed almost any careless remark against the Church, even a drunken joke, under which label?
Lutheran
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.
Q 29Under which ruler was the Spanish Inquisition first abolished, in 1808?
Joseph Bonaparte
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.
Q 30Which king restored the Spanish Inquisition in 1814, only for his widow to abolish it for good in 1834?
Ferdinand VII
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.