The Turks in 1480 attacked the south Italian city of Otranto. 12,000 people were killed, the rest made slaves. The Turks killed every cleric in the city and sawed the archbishop in two. So Queen Isabel sent a fleet to Italy. In September of 1480, when it was clear the Turks might do the same to any coastal city, King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella established the Inquisition. It dealt with the special problem of those who pretended to become Christians, but were not really converted, and might open the gates of the city to the Turks.
During this period the West was in danger of following the fate of Constantinople and falling under the sword of Islam. Indeed Protestant and Catholic princes joined forces against the threat and at one point the Turkish armies were at the gates of Vienna.
Otherwise, the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, 16 miles away from Spain, formed part of a vast imperial system established by the Muslim Turks, a system as powerful and menacing to western Europe as the Soviet bloc was conceived to be in our day.
It was under this threat that the Pope Sixtus IV authorized the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 if it should be needed. The kings of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand, instituted it two years later. The specific threat that the Inquisition faced was the "conversos." Spain had been freed form Islamic control for only a few generations, after 800 years of oppression... and not completely, because Islam still ruled in Granada up to 1492.
The Spanish Inquisition was independent of the Medieval Inquisition. It was established by Ferdinand and Isabella with the reluctant approval of Sixtus IV. It was entirely controlled by the Spanish kings, and the pope's only hold over it was in naming the inquisitor general chosen by the kings. The popes were never reconciled to the institution, which they regarded as usurping a church prerogative.
The Spanish Inquisition had no authority over practicing Muslims and Jews, only over professed Christians suspected of being fakes and a threat to the country... it remained operative in Spain into the nineteenth century. Originally called into being against secret Islam and secret Judaism, it served also to repel Protestantism in the sixteenth century, but was unable to expel French Rationalism and immorality of the eighteenth... it also took some action against witchcraft though it was very limited compared with the 30,000 witches burned in England and the 100,000 in Germany.
It was a state institution used to identify conversos, mainly Muslims (Moors, Moros), and Jews (Marranos), who falsely "converted" to Christianity and secretly practiced their former religion. Its job was also, and more importantly, to clear the good name of many people who were falsely accused.
The judges were to be at least forty years old, of unimpeachable reputation, distinguished for virtue and wisdom, masters of theology, or doctors or licentiates of canon law, and they must follow the usual ecclesiastical rules and regulations.
On 17 September, 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella appointed, at first for Seville, two Dominicans as inquisitors, with two of the secular clergy assistants. Fray Tomás Torquemada (at Valladolid in 1420, at Avila, in 1498) was the true organizer of the Spanish Inquisition. The institution speedily ramified from Seville to Cordova, Jaen, Valladolid, Villareal, and Toledo, About 1538 there were nineteen courts, to which three were afterwards added in Spanish America (Mexico, Lima, and Cartagena). The Spanish government tried to establish the Inquisition in all its dominions; but in the Spanish Netherlands the local officials did not cooperate, and the inquisitors were chased (1510) out of Naples, apparently with the pope's connivance.
King Joseph Bonaparte abrogated it in 1808, but it was reintroduced by Ferdinand VII in 1814 and approved by Pius VII on certain conditions, among others the abolition of torture. It was definitely abolished in 1820.
The Spanish Inquisition was much harsher, more highly organized, and far freer with the death penalty than the Medieval Inquisition... soon no Spaniard could feel safe from it; thus, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Theresa of Ávila were investigated for heresy, and they were absolved!.
A most important point made by the Spanish scholars is that the inquisitional courts of the Church were both more just and more lenient than civil courts and religious courts elsewhere in Europe at the time. Prisoners in Spanish secular courts, knowing this would sometimes blaspheme in order to be sent to the courts of the Inquisition where conditions were better.
No comments:
Post a Comment