Scholars distinguish between the medieval, or papal, Inquisition, which evolved in the thirteenth century to combat the Cathar heresy in southern France, and the modern Inquisition, reestablished in parts of Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Foundations
The first two modern Inquisitions were established in Spain (1478) and Portugal (1536) to deal with a heresy peculiar to the Iberian Peninsula, Cryptojudaism, or a reversion to Judaism among converts to Christianity (conversos). To punish this form of apostasy, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella obtained authorization in 1478 from Pope Sixtus IV to establish a new Inquisition in Castile, and later, in 1483, to revive Aragón's medieval tribunals. Nonetheless, cases of Judaizing continued to occur, so the Catholic monarchs took the extreme decision in 1492 of ordering all Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave Castile. Many Jews crossed the border to Portugal to join the large numbers of conversos who had already fled there from Spain. In 1496, the king of Portugal, John II, ordered the expulsion of Jews from his territory, and in 1497, the conversion of any who remained, who joined ranks with the Spanish refugees. The presence of this group of New Christians eventually forced John III to bring the Inquisition to Portugal in 1536.
Pope Paul III, who had authorized the foundation of the Portuguese Inquisition, six years later (1542) revived the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the Italian Papal States. Here, however, the Roman Inquisition's concern was not Judaizing, but the threat to Italy from Protestantism. Soon, other states in the Italian peninsula reinstated local tribunals of the Inquisition: Naples and Venice in 1547, and Milan in 1562.
Institutional Structure and Procedure
The modern Inquisitions generally followed the body of jurisprudence developed by the medieval Inquisition, compiled in 1376 by Nicolau Eimeric into the Directorium inquisitorum, revised in the late sixteenth century by Francisco Peña. Unlike their medieval predecessor, however, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were controlled by the crown, and in Italy, there was considerable secular oversight as well, except in the Papal States. In Spain, Ferdinand created a government board, the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition, which established policies and procedures, oversaw the appointment of officials and functioning of tribunals throughout the Spanish realms, and served as the court of appeals. Until 1560, the number and territories of the Spanish districts fluctuated considerably; thereafter they remained stable at fourteen peninsular tribunals and four island tribunals (Mallorca, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Canaries). Additional tribunals were added as the empire expanded: Mexico, Lima, Cartagena de Indias, Manila, and finally, the royal court at Madrid.
Portugal's Inquisition was also placed under the direction of a royal board, known as the General Council. Ultimately, there were tribunals in Lisbon, Coimbra, and Evora, plus another in Goa, the Portuguese colony in India.
In Italy, the papacy attempted to exert some control over the Inquisitions outside the Papal States; this process culminated in the establishment of the Congregazione del Sant' Ufficio in 1588. As was the case in Portugal and Spain, the Congregation functioned as the supreme appellate court for the tribunals in Italy. In each of the states with Inquisitions, the network of local tribunals followed the preexisting structure of bishoprics. For example, in the Republic of Venice, aside from the head tribunal in Venice itself, there were tribunals at Brescia, Padua, Udine, Treviso, Cyprus, Rovigo, Picenza, Bergamo, Vicenza, Verona, and Capo d'Istria.
Thanks to a shared legal tradition, the operation of the Inquisition in each area was similar. In Spain each tribunal consisted of one or two inquisitors, a fiscal prosecutor, defense attorney, various employees who were charged with record keeping and care of the prisoners, unpaid theological and legal consultants, and a network of local legal representatives (comisarios) and messengers/jailors (familiars), also unpaid, who created an inquisitorial presence in the hinterland. Strict guidelines established the qualifications for various members of the tribunal. Inquisitors had to be at least forty years old, licentiates or doctors in theology or canon law. After the fifteenth century, few Spanish inquisitors were drawn from the religious orders such as the Dominicans, who had once dominated the medieval institution. Comisarios were drawn from the local secular clergy, and familiars were laymen of uncontested Christian ancestry. Portugal's tribunals were structured along the same lines, while in Italy, often only one inquisitor led the court (in Iberia there were two), while the local legal representatives, known as vicarii, held more power than their Iberian counterparts. Unlike their Iberian counterparts, both the inquisitors and the vicars came from the ranks of the regular religious orders, primarily the Dominicans and Franciscans.
A tribunal generated its cases in a variety of ways. The standard method was for the inquisitor to go on a visitation of his district. First, the inquisitor would issue the Edict of Grace, a sermon that defined the heresies sought after and promised leniency for those who confessed within thirty days. The follow-up sermon, the Edict of Faith, offered no leniency but continued the exhortations to confess. Voting members of the tribunal would examine the resulting confessions and issue a warrant for arrest. Once detained, the prisoner disappeared to the outside world: in order to inspire fear and prevent reprisals, the courts attempted to conduct their business in the strictest secrecy. Similar secrecy within the proceedings kept the prisoner at a disadvantage. Not until well into the trial did the prisoner learn the charges against him, and never was the accused allowed to know who had given evidence against him—or, once freed, to speak about his experiences. With the inquisitor acting as both judge and investigator, the prosecution presented its case first, and the defendant, with the aid of a court-appointed lawyer, could respond. At this point, if the defendant's confession was not seen as sufficient, the tribunal would vote on the question of torture: what kind and how much. In reality, torture was employed rarely (in less than 3 percent of cases) and frequently was overcome. The large majority of cases ended in guilty verdicts. In Spain and Portugal, the final act in the trial was the public auto-da-fé, where prisoners were sentenced amid great ceremony; actual punishments were carried out separately. An important tool of the Iberian Inquisition was public humiliation: those convicted of serious offenses were required to wear the sanbenito, a distinctive outer tunic that was also displayed in the convict's parish church.
Abolition came slowly, with the advance of the Enlightenment and then French troops to southern Europe. Generally, the Italian tribunals were disbanded between 1774 and 1800, and the Iberian ones disappeared between 1812 and 1834, although the Spanish and American tribunals effectively ended operation in 1820. The fate of each tribunal's archives is capricious: some survive virtually intact, while others disappeared during the Napoleonic Wars. Major repositories exist in the Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), and in the Archivi dell'Inquisizione Romana (The Vatican, opened in 1998), but substantial numbers of trials and other papers remain outside these repositories.
Considerable controversy exists over how many individuals were tried and executed by the courts, but the loss of so many records makes precise accounting impossible. A survey of nineteen Spanish tribunals from 1540 to 1700 yielded 49,092 cases. The Portuguese Inquisition tried 44,817 cases between 1536 and 1767, the most active court being Goa. Naples between 1564 and 1740 tried 3,038 cases, and Venice between 1547 and 1794 tried 3,592 cases. The death sentence was invoked in less than 5 percent of all trials. In Spain and Portugal the first victims were conversos, many of whom were sentenced to death (often in absentia), while the Italian courts pursued Protestants. With time, the tribunals changed their focus and moderated their severity: in Spain, converted Muslims (Moriscos), homosexuals, Protestants, witches, and ordinary Spaniards guilty of making crude theological statements all at some point became the focus of the tribunals' attention. Indeed, relatively minor crimes such as blasphemy accounted for much of the Spanish Inquisition's caseload. In addition to punishing religious crimes, all of the Inquisitions were responsible for enforcing censorship of printed materials and searching for contraband.
Impact and Lasting Significance
Because of the Inquisition's role in censorship, many have accused the institution of curbing scientific inquiry, dampening literary creativity, and even hindering economic growth. Historians now reject these charges. A few cases achieved notoriety in their day and continue to define the image of the Inquisition in the public's mind. Most infamous is the case of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who was summoned before the Roman Inquisition in 1632 to account for his public defense of the Copernican system, earlier deemed heretical by the church. He was condemned to perpetual house arrest and silence on the issue. For many, this trial epitomizes the conflict between scientific reason and free speech on the one hand, and religious fanaticism on the other. The philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was not so lucky as Galileo; he was burned at the stake for his radical ideas about revealed religion and the possibility of an infinite universe with multiple worlds. In Spain, fear of religious experimentation led the inquisitors to target some of the leading mystics of the sixteenth century—St. Theresa of Jesus, St. John of the Cross, and Luis de León—although none was executed. Such cases, added to the Inquisition's role in censorship, the stream of Protestant propaganda directed against the papacy, and the Enlightenment's championship of basic freedoms, combined to create a lasting image of an arbitrarily cruel and inhumane institution. In the last twenty-five years, however, new scholarship has done much to mitigate the fearsome image of the Inquisition and to place the institution in its proper historical context.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Del Col, Andrea, ed. Domenico Scandella Known as Menocchio: His Trials before the Inquisition (1583–1599). Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. Binghamton, N.Y., 1996.
Eimeric, Nicolau, and Francisco Peña. Le manuel des inquisiteurs. Translated and with introduction by Louis Sala-Molins. Paris, 1973.
Firpo, Massimo, and Dario Marcatto, eds. Il processo inquisitoriale del Cardinal Giovanni Morone: Edizione critica. 6 vols. Rome, 1981–1995.
Simancas, Diego de. Institutiones catholicae quibus ordine ac brevitate discritur quicquid ad praecavendas et extirpandas haereses necessariium est. Valladolid, 1552.
Secondary Sources
Bethencourt, Francisco. La Inquisición en la época moderna: España, Portugal, e Italia, siglos XV–XIX. Madrid, 1997.
Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, 1977.
Henningsen, Gustav, and John Tedeschi in association with Charles Amiel, eds. The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods. De Kalb, Ill., 1986.
Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision. London, 1997.
Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of Spain. 4 vols. New York, 1906–1908.
——. The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. New York, 1908.
Netanyahu, Benzion. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain. New York, 1995.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth, and Anne J. Cruz, eds. Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World. Berkeley, 1991.
Peters, Edward. Inquisition. New York and London, 1988.
Vekene, Emil van der. Bibliotheca bibliographica historiae sanctae Inquisitionis. Bibliographisches Verzeichnis des gedruckten Schrifftums zur Geschichte und Literatur der Inquisition. 3 vols. Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 1982–1992.
—SARA TILGHMAN NALLE
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