Chapter Nineteen
The Shocking Truth About the Spanish Inquisition

LUTHERANS WERE PERSECUTED IN MANY Catholic nations and even in “Protestant” England. In Spain, of course, they became targets of the Inquisition.

The term Spanish Inquisition brings to mind what is remembered as one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history. According to the standard account, the Inquisition was created in 1478 by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, and was charged with ridding Spain of heretics, especially Jews and Muslims who were pretending to be Christians. But the Inquisition also set its sights on all Protestants, witches, homosexuals, scientists, and other doctrinal and moral offenders.

For the first several years, the Inquisition was rather inactive, but after the fanatical Dominican monk Tomás de Torquemada was appointed grand inquisitor in 1483, this hideous Catholic institution tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people. Nearly every Saturday in every major Spanish city there was an auto-de-fe and the air was filled with ashes as screaming victims were burned at the stake, usually after having been mercilessly tortured. On many Saturdays, piles of offensive books, especially scientific treatises, also were burned during the autos-de-fe.

The Inquisition did not even pretend to observe any semblance of legal procedure, seizing people right and left on the flimsiest accusations as the inquisitors grew rich from confiscating the wealth of the accused. Writing in 1554, the English Protestant John Foxe reported on “the extreme dealing and cruel ravening of these Catholic Inquisitors of Spain, who, under the pretended visor of religion, do nothing but seek their private gain and spoiling of other men’s goods.”¹ Thirteen years later came the truly devastating exposé, written in Latin by Reginaldus Montanus: A Discovery and Plaine Declaration of Sundry Subtill Practices of the Holy Inquisition of Spain. Translated into English, French, Dutch, and German, it was widely circulated. Montanus’s account “emphasize[d] the deviousness and trickery of the interrogation techniques, the variety of horrors in its torture chambers, and the appalling behavior of its familiars, prison keepers, and torturers.”² The main part of the book follows an innocent victim through the entire ordeal, ending at the stake, and the book concludes with twelve case histories of Lutherans martyred for their faith.

Montanus’s volume became the standard account. According to a recent edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia, “Torture of the accused... soon became customary and notorious.... Most trials resulted in a verdict of guilty.”³ On these grounds the popular historian Will Durant (1885–1981) informed several generations of readers that “we must rank the Inquisition... as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.”⁴

Not only historians, but novelists, painters, and screenwriters have repeatedly recreated scenes of brutal inquisitorial sadism—Edgar Allen Poe’s story of “The Pit and the Pendulum” being a classic among them. Another is Dostoyevsky’s passage in The Brothers Karamazov wherein the grand inquisitor encounters Christ as he raises a child from the dead, whereupon he has Jesus seized and informs him that: “Tomorrow I shall condemn thee and burn thee at the stake as the worst of heretics.”

How many victims were there? Microsoft’s Encarta says that Torquemada “executed thousands.” Jonathan Kirsch placed the Inquisition’s casualty list as “countless thousands.”⁵ The Encyclopedia of Religious Freedom puts Torquemada’s total at ten thousand as does Edmond Paris,⁶ who also claims that another 125,000 died of torture and privation in Torquemada’s prisons. Many historians have accepted the “conservative” estimate that during the effective lifetime of the Inquisition more than thirty-five thousand people were burned at the stake,⁷ but one very recent author claims that well over a hundred thousand died during Torquemada’s tenure alone.⁸ Another historian has proposed that the Inquisition burned “nearly two hundred thousand... in thirty-six years.”⁹ Yet another claims that overall the Inquisition condemned more than three million, “with about 300,000 burned at the stake.”¹⁰

Despite these immense variations in estimated fatalities, everyone agrees that the Inquisition was a blood bath perpetrated by sadistic fanatics. In his recent exposé, The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God (2008), Jonathan Kirsch devoted the second paragraph of the book to invoking the image of “hooded men in dungeons lit only by torches... plying instruments of torture to the naked bodies of men and women whose only crime is to have entertained some thought that the Church regarded as heretical.... [T]he torturers are wholly without pity, and they work in the sure conviction that the odor of the charred flesh of humans is ‘delectable to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin.’ ”

But the most shocking truth about the Spanish Inquisition is that everything above is either an outright lie or a wild exaggeration !

Creating the “Black Legend”

THE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF the Spanish Inquisition was invented and spread by English and Dutch propagandists in the sixteenth century during their wars with Spain and repeated ever after by malicious or misled historians eager to sustain “an image of Spain as a nation of fanatical bigots.”¹¹ This image of Spain is now referred to by fair-minded historians as the “Black Legend,” which the American historian Charles Gibson (1920–1985) defined as “the accumulated tradition of propaganda and Hispanophobia according to which [the Spanish are]... regarded as cruel, bigoted, exploitative, and self- righteous.”¹² Although these tales of Spanish brutality originated in the days of Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada, they refused to die, being sustained by generations of “respectable” British historians who also openly expressed their contempt and antagonism toward Roman Catholicism—attitudes reflected in the fact that Catholic students were denied admission to Oxford and Cambridge until 1871.

However, the wildest exaggerations about the Spanish Inquisition originated with and were repeatedly fueled by Spanish “defectors.” Consider that “Montanus” (see above) was the pen name used by a renegade Spanish monk who became a Lutheran and fled to the Netherlands where he wrote his infamous book. As the distinguished Edward Peters noted, “Part of Montanus’ appeal lay in the base of accuracy upon which he erected an otherwise extremely misleading description of the Inquisition to an audience prepared to believe the worst.... Montanus portrays every victim of the Inquisition as innocent, every Inquisition official as venal and deceitful, every step in the procedure as a violation of natural and rational law.”¹³ Again, early in the nineteenth century a sensational attack on the Inquisition was written by a Spanish émigré living in London, D. Antonio Puigblanch (1775–1840): The Inquisition Unmasked: Being an Historical and Philosophical Account of the Tremendous Tribunal (1816). This widely read two-volume work ran to nearly a thousand pages devoted to recounting the “enormous crimes... committed by this tribunal [that]... rendered its name so odious—crimes so much more revolting and abominable, because they have been committed under the sanction of religion.”¹⁴ Recently, Kessinger Publishing chose to include this work in its series of “rare reprints.”

The Real Inquisition

THAT SUCH BIGOTRY FLOURISHED during Europe’s era of religious wars is not surprising. Nor is it so surprising that this hateful nonsense was sustained during the era of intense anti-Catholicism that continued in England (and the United States) well into the twentieth century.¹⁵ But there is no such excuse for those irresponsible contemporary “scholars” who continue to support such claims while ignoring or dismissing the remarkable research on the Inquisition that has been accomplished in the past generation.¹⁶ Astonishing as it may seem, the new historians of the Inquisition have revealed that, in contrast with the secular courts all across Europe, the Spanish Inquisition was a consistent force for justice, restraint, due process, and enlightenment.¹⁷

These historians (many of them being neither Spanish nor Catholic) base their dissenting views on having gained full access to the complete archives of the Inquisitions of both Aragon and Castile, which together constituted the Spanish Inquisition. Subsequently, they have read the careful records made of each of the 44,701 cases heard by these two Inquisitions between 1540 and 1700. At the time they were written these records were secret so there is no reason for the clerks to have misrepresented the actual proceedings. Not only are these cases a goldmine of historical detail; each has been entered into a database in order to facilitate statistical analysis.¹⁸ In addition, these historians have done an immense amount of more traditional research, pouring over diaries, letters, decrees, and other old documents. The results are solidly undeniable. The remainder of this chapter offers a summary of the major discoveries.

Deaths

THE TERM AUTO-DE-FE DOES not mean execution, let alone burning at the stake, but is best translated as “act of faith.” The inquisitors were far more concerned with repentance than with punishment and therefore an auto-de-fe consisted of a public appearance by persons convicted of various offenses who offered public confessions of their guilt and were thereby reconciled to the church. Only very rarely did an auto-de-fe end with an offender being surrendered to the civil authorities for execution (the Inquisition did not ever conduct an actual execution). Even so, autos-de-fe were not frequent. In the city of Toledo, between 1575 and 1610, only twelve autos-de-fe were held, “at which 386 culprits appeared.”¹⁹ Obviously, then, the tales of weekly mass burnings all across Spain are malicious fantasies. So, how many did die?

The first decades of the Inquisition’s operations were not as fully documented as they were after 1540, but historians now agree that these were its bloodiest days and that perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people may have been executed, or about thirty a year.²⁰ Turning to the fully recorded period, of the 44,701 cases tried, only 826 people were executed, which amounts to 1.8 percent of those brought to trial.²¹ Together, this adds up to a total of about 2,300 deaths spread over more than two centuries, a total that is a far cry from the “conservative” estimates that more than thirty thousand were burned by the Inquisition. In fact, fewer people were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition over more than two centuries than the three thousand French Calvinists who were killed in Paris alone during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.²² Or compare this with the thousands of English Lutherans, Lollards, and Catholics (in addition to two of his wives) that Henry VIII is credited with having boiled, burned, beheaded, or hanged.²³ The fact is that during the entire period 1480 through 1700, only about ten deaths per year were meted out by the Inquisition all across Spain—and usually to repeat offenders! By modern Western standards, of course, even ten executions a year for various acts of religious nonconformity seem a dreadful excess. But during the time in question there was no religious toleration anywhere in Europe and capital punishment was the norm for all offenses, religious or otherwise. In context, then, the Spanish Inquisition was remarkably restrained.

Torture

IN POPULAR CULTURE, THE term Inquisition is nearly a synonym for torture. As John Dowling (1808–1878) explained, “Of all the inventions of popish cruelty the Holy Inquisition is the masterpiece.... It was impossible for even Satan himself to conceive a more horrible contrivance of torture and blood.”²⁴ Thus, as noted above, it has been taken for granted that many more poor souls died in the Inquisition’s prisons and torture chambers than survived long enough to go to the stake.

This may be the biggest lie of all! Every court in Europe used torture, but the Inquisition did so far less than other courts. For one thing, church law limited torture to one session lasting no more than fifteen minutes, and there could be no danger to life or limb. Nor could blood be shed!²⁵ There are, of course, very painful techniques that can be applied within these rules. But even so, torture was rarely used, perhaps because the “inquisitors themselves were sceptical of the efficacy and validity of torture as a method of conviction.”²⁶ If torture was used, its progress was carefully recorded by a clerk and this material was included with the record of the case.²⁷ Based on these data, Thomas Madden has estimated that the inquisitors resorted to torture in only about 2 percent of all the cases that came before them.²⁸ Moreover, it is widely agreed that prisons operated by the Inquisition were by far the most comfortable and humane in Europe; instances have been reported of “criminals in Spain purposely blaspheming so as to be transferred to the Inquisition’s prisons.”²⁹

So there it is. Contrary to the standard myth, the Inquisition made little use of the stake, seldom tortured anyone, and maintained unusually decent prisons. But what about its procedures? The remainder of the chapter examines the workings of the Inquisition, organized on the basis of the alleged offenses.

Witchcraft

PERHAPS NO HISTORICAL STATISTICS have been so outrageously inflated as the numbers of those executed as witches during the craze that took place in Europe from about 1450 to 1700. Many writers have placed the final death toll at nine million, drawing comparisons with the Holocaust.³⁰ And while it is acknowledged that Protestants burned a lot of witches too, historians have stressed the leading role played by the Inquisition; one prominent historian even claimed that the Inquisition began hunting witches because it had run out of heretics to burn.³¹ Several others have blamed the whole thing on the dire effects of celibacy which inflamed priests to “a raging campaign of revenge and annihilation” against women.³² Finally, it is widely claimed that the witch hunts ended only when the “Dark Ages” of religious extremism were overthrown by the “Enlightenment.”³³

Vicious nonsense, all of it.

Consider that the witch hunts reached their height during the so-called Enlightenment! Indeed, in his celebrated book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1599–1679), the famous English philosopher and proponent of the “Enlightenment,” wrote that “as for witches... they are justly punished.”³⁴ Another leading figure of the “Enlightenment,” Jean Bodin (ca. 1530–1596), served as a judge at several witchcraft trials and advocated burning witches in the slowest possible fires.³⁵ In fact, many of the distinguished scientists of the seventeenth century, including Robert Boyle, encouraged witch hunts.³⁶

As for the death toll, in recent years competent scholars have carefully assembled the evidence nation-by-nation and found the “accepted” totals to be utterly fantastic. For example, it had long been assumed that in England from 1600 to 1680, “about forty-two thousand witches were burnt,”³⁷ but the most trustworthy figure turns out to be fewer than a thousand over a period of three centuries.³⁸ In similar fashion, the best estimate of the final death toll is not nine million, but about sixty thousand!³⁹ Even that is a tragic total, but it needs to be recognized that a mere handful of these victims were sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition—so few that the distinguished historian William Monter entitled a chapter in his statistical study of the Inquisition as “Witchcraft: The Forgotten Offense.”⁴⁰ This was in response to data showing that during the century 1540–1640, when the witch hunts were at their peak in most of Europe, the Inquisition of Aragon (one of the two Inquisitions functioning in Spain) executed only twelve people for “superstition and witchcraft.”⁴¹ This should have been acknowledged all along. Even the virulently anti-Catholic historian Henry C. Lea (1825–1909) agreed that witch hunting was “rendered comparatively harmless” in Spain and that this “was due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition.”⁴² Let us examine this wisdom and firmness in some detail.

To begin, it is important to recognize what sustained the charge of witchcraft since it is not the case that the accusations were nothing but unfounded hysteria—many people actually were “doing something” that led them to be charged. What they were doing was practicing magic. As would be expected in an era that was extremely deficient in medical knowledge, medical magic abounded in Europe and so did magical attempts to influence weather, crops, love, wealth, and other human concerns. As was noted in chapter 15, the critical distinction was between church and nonchurch magic.

Church magic was plentiful: sacred wells, springs, groves, and shrines abounded where supplicants could seek all sorts of miracles and blessings. In addition, priests had an extensive array of incantations, prayers, and rites available for dealing with many human concerns and especially for treating illness—there were many priests who specialized in exorcism. Parallel to this elaborate system of church magic was an extensive culture of folk or traditional magic, a substantial portion of which also was devoted to treating medical problems. Some of this magic dated from pre-Christian times and much of it was a somewhat jumbled adaptation of church magic. This nonchurch magic was sustained by local practitioners, sometimes referred to as “Wise Ones.” Often these practitioners performed nonmagical functions too, as in the case of midwives who combined their practical skills with magical spells to deliver babies. It should be mentioned that sometimes priests engaged in “corruptions” of church magic as in the case of a village priest who baptized coins in holy oil in hopes that they would be replaced as soon as they were spent,⁴³ and the many priests who baptized various objects such as magnets in hopes of creating love potions, although love potions were vigorously condemned by the church.⁴⁴ Even though performed by priests, such activities were regarded as nonchurch magic by the religious authorities.

All magic appears to work, some of the time. Thus some sufferers who turned to their local priest got well. But so did some who turned to their local “Wise One.” This posed a serious theological issue, and the attempt to find a logical explanation resulted in tragedy. The question was posed: If church magic works because God invests it with the power to do so, why does nonchurch magic work too? Surely, these powers do not come from God. The conclusion seemed obvious: nonchurch magic works because Satan empowers it! Hence, to practice nonchurch magic constitutes invoking Satan and his demons. That is the definition of witchcraft.⁴⁵

Efforts to expose and suppress evil in the form of nonchurch magic soon led to public panics in many parts of Europe. All sorts of lurid tales and fears spread rapidly and, especially in places where governance was weak, mobs and local authorities were swept up in the witchcraft craze. These same fears and impulses arose among people in Spain too, but there they were effectively squelched by the Inquisition.

One reason that the Inquisition prevented a witch craze in Spain is because during its very first cases involving the use of nonchurch magic, the inquisitors paid close attention to what the accused had to say. What they learned was that magical practitioners had no intention whatever of invoking Satanic forces. In fact, many thought they were using church magic! This was because the practices and procedures involved were very similar to those authorized for use by the clergy—recitation of fragments of liturgy, appeals to saints, sprinkling holy water taken from a local church on an afflicted area, and repeatedly making the sign of the cross. As a result, the accused seemed sincerely surprised to learn they had been doing anything wrong.

In fact, the main reason these efforts did not qualify as church magic was because the accused were not ordained and therefore they were not authorized to conduct such activities. Hence if their magic worked, it was not God’s doing. That is, the Spanish inquisitors agreed with their colleagues elsewhere that nonchurch magic worked only because of Satanic intervention. However, because they had listened to the accused with a sympathetic ear, the Spanish inquisitors initiated a crucial distinction “between the implicit and explicit invocation of demons.”⁴⁶ Thus they assumed that most accused of using nonchurch magic (including priests) were sincere Catholics who meant no harm and had been unaware of invoking demons. While it was wrong even to have implicitly invoked demons, it should be forgiven in the ordinary way, through confession and absolution. Consequently, nearly no witches were sent to the stake by the Spanish Inquisition and those who were usually had been convicted for the third or fourth time.

Even more important, the Inquisition used its power and influence to suppress witch hunting by local mobs or secular authorities. An example occurred in Barcelona in 1549, just as the most ferocious witch hunts broke out in other parts of Europe. Local officials accused seven women as witches and the official of the local branch of the Inquisition approved that they be burned. The members of the Suprema (the ruling body of the Inquisition) were appalled that such a thing could happen and sent the inquisitor Francisco Vaca to investigate. Upon arrival he sacked the local representative of the Inquisition and ordered the immediate release of two women still being held under sentence of death. After further investigation he dismissed all pending charges and required the return of all confiscated property to the families of the victims. In his report, Vaca dismissed the charges of witchcraft as “laughable” and wrote, “one of the most damning indictments of witch persecution ever recorded.”⁴⁷ His colleagues on the Suprema agreed and thereafter turned their vengeance upon those who conducted unauthorized witch hunts, having several of them executed and sending others to serve long sentences in the galleys.⁴⁸

Even so, in 1610 six persons were burned as witches by local officials in Logroño. When they heard of this, the Suprema dispatched Alonso de Salazar y Frias, who spent more than a year interviewing the local inhabitants and inviting them to repudiate their errors (mostly having to do with superstition and magic). At the end of his mission, Salazar reported that he had reconciled 1,802 persons to the church. He also reported the negative results of his investigation of witchcraft: “I have not found the slightest evidence that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.”⁴⁹ Salazar went on to suggest that efforts should be made to prevent public discussion and agitation concerning the topic; the preaching of sermons about witchcraft should especially be avoided, because he had discovered “that there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about.”⁵⁰

Salazar’s report soon circulated widely among clergy all across Europe. Many of them, including the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, soon joined in denouncing witch hunts, and it was their influence, and especially their discrediting of evidence gained by torture, that brought witch burning to an end in Catholic areas—an effect that soon seeped into the Protestant areas as well. Some historians like to claim that witch hunting finally ended because it was attacked by participants in the “Enlightenment,” such as Balthasar Bekker. But none of these “enlightened” attacks on witch hunts appeared until nearly a century after efforts by Catholic clergy had discredited the witch craze and made it entirely safe to say such things.⁵¹

Heresy

THE SPANISH INQUISITION WAS founded to deal with a social crisis concerning Jews and Muslims who had become Christians. The standard story misrepresents everyone involved. It portrays the Jewish and Muslim converts as overwhelmingly insincere, having only pretended to become Christians, while continuing to live as “crypto-Jews” (Marranos ) or “crypto-Muslims” (Moriscos ). And it portrays the Inquisition as brutally determined to unmask all these pretenders and burn them for heresy. The truth is that nearly all of the Jewish and most of Muslim converts were sincere, and the Inquisition was founded to suppress and replace the chronic outbreaks of mob violence against them with due process, as well as to expose those whose conversions were insincere. Soon after the Inquisition began to operate, Luther’s Reformation rocked the religious consciousness of Europe, soon joined by other Protestant movements. Although the Spanish crown was steadfastly Catholic, a small underground Lutheran movement arose in Spain (often involving priests and monks), and the Inquisition was directed to repress it.

Marranos

For more than a thousand years, more Jews lived in Spain than in “all the countries of medieval Europe combined.”⁵² It was in Spain that the renaissance of the Hebrew language was made possible by the creation of a Hebrew grammar—the Jews of the Diaspora had so completely lost the ability to read and write Hebrew that their scriptures had to be translated into Greek several centuries before the birth of Jesus. But in Spain, beginning in the tenth century there was a sudden flowering of Hebrew poetry and other writing.⁵³ Moreover, the center of this Hebrew renaissance was in the Christian areas of Spain and as Christian forces slowly drove the Muslims south, Jews continued to migrate north. When Jewish minorities have enjoyed amicable relations with their social environment, a substantial amount of conversion often has occurred,⁵⁴ and that is what happened in Spain. A wave of Jewish conversions to Christianity began in the fourteenth century, as tens of thousands accepted baptism, and came to be known as conversos.⁵⁵ This caused immense bitterness in the Spanish Jewish community—Maimonides proposed that conversos be stoned as idolaters. Worse yet, since Jewish leaders in Spain presumed that no Jew would willingly abandon the faith, they concluded that these conversions somehow must have been forced and insincere—a falsehood that has lived on to corrupt historical accounts ever after.⁵⁶ In fact, these conversions were so sincere that soon many of the leading Christians in Spain, including bishops and cardinals, were of converso family origins. Indeed, in 1391 the chief rabbi of Burgos had himself and his whole family baptized and eventually he became the bishop of Burgos.⁵⁷ The sheer number of Jewish converts as well as their prominence (King Ferdinand had a converso grandmother),⁵⁸ impeded assimilation and led to antagonisms between “old” and “new” Christians that eventually resulted in armed conflicts between the two. Not surprisingly, “old” Christians were inclined to accuse “new” ones of being insincere “crypto-Jews,” and too often some Spanish Jews were eager to support such charges. That turned out to be misguided because antagonism toward the conversos soon was expanded to include attacks on the Jews by “old” Christians.

It was this mess that the Inquisition was commissioned to sort out. The inquisitors were able to stifle much of the mob action and disorder, but could not forge a lasting peace, with the tragic result being the edict of 1492 ordering that Spain’s remaining Jews either convert or leave. However, the Inquisition eventually dissipated the conflicts over “crypto-Jews.” It did so largely by failing to discover many offenders. Although many cases were tried, the actual total was far below what would have been expected given the huge and angry literature on the topic, which often seems to suggest that most conversos were dragged before the inquisitors. The data for the Inquisition in Aragon (1540–1640)—one of the two divisions of the Spanish Inquisition, and the one for which executions are broken down by offense—show that only 942 or 3.6 percent of all the cases tried involved charges of being a Marrano, far below the numbers tried for being Moriscos or Luteranos (Protestants). Some of these alleged Marranos were exonerated. Not only that, but only 16 of the 942 defendants (1.7 percent) were executed.⁵⁹ So much then for claims such as that by Cecil Roth (1899–1970), who wrote that Marranos “furnished a disproportionately large number... of those condemned to death,”⁶⁰ of Netanyahu’s fraudulent charge that the Inquisition “burned them by the thousands.”⁶¹

Moriscos

Morisco refers to a Muslim who falsely converted rather than leave Spain subsequent to the Christian Reconquest. Moriscos posed a far more serious threat than did Jews or converts from Judaism. They were far more numerous, they had a distinctive geography wherein they often constituted the majority of residents, they spoke their own language, and their conversions often had been compelled. Indeed, the Moriscos mounted several bloody insurrections.⁶² Even so, many Jewish historians have claimed that Moriscos were treated far more leniently than Marranos by the Inquisition: “far fewer Moriscos than conversos [crypto-Jews] were sentenced.”⁶³ Wrong! The Inquisition in Aragon tried 7,472 cases based on accusations of being a Morisco, or 29 percent of all the cases it heard. Of these, 181 were executed, or 2.4 percent, which was slightly more than the rate for Marranos.

Luteranos

The various Protestant Reformations made little headway in Spain. In large part this was because earlier attempts at church reform had been extremely successful in Spain. As Yale’s celebrated Roland Bainton (1894–1984) put it: “Spain originated the Catholic reformation before ever the Protestant had begun.”⁶⁴ The result was a remarkable increase in popular support for the church and the lack of the substantial discontent that elsewhere favored Lutheranism and Calvinism. In fact, most who embraced or even dabbled in Protestantism (referred to in Spain as Luteranos ) seem to have been clergy. In any event, 2,284 people were brought before the Inquisition in Aragon charged with being Luteranos, or 8.8 percent of all the cases heard. These cases resulted in 122 executions, or 5.3 percent of those charged—more than twice the rate as for those charged as Moriscos.

During the life of the Spanish Inquisition all European nations persecuted religious minorities and dissenters.⁶⁵ In addition to hunting for Lollards and Lutherans, the English searched high and low for undercover Catholic priests and executed those they found. The French martyred thousands of Huguenots and the Dutch Calvinists also hanged priests. Anabaptists were harassed in both the Lutheran and the Catholic parts of Germany, while in Geneva Calvin persecuted both Anabaptists and Catholics. But somehow, these activities have been treated as “different” from the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution of Luteranos.

Sexuality

THE INQUISITORS ALSO CONCERNED themselves with sexual misbehavior, dividing the offenses into four main categories.

Solicitation involved a priest using the confessional and his powers of granting or withholding absolution to have sexual activities with a woman. Of the 44,701 cases in the main database, there are 1,131 cases of solicitation, or 2.5 percent of all cases. A priest convicted of this offense could at the very least expect a severe flogging, followed by lifelong shame. Those discovered to have had an extensive career of solicitations were sentenced to long terms of penal servitude, and several notorious cases resulted in executions.

Bigamy probably was quite widespread in this era when divorce was nearly unavailable, but only rarely did it become such a public scandal as to attract the attention of the Inquisition (on grounds that it was sacrilegious). Even so, the major database includes 2,645 cases of bigamy (or 5.9 percent of the total). In addition to cancellation of the second marriage, the usual penalty involved only public disgrace and a period of banishment from the community of residence. Women made up 20 percent of those convicted of bigamy.⁶⁶

Sodomy primarily consisted of male homosexuality, but some cases of female homosexuality also were tried, as were some cases involving heterosexual anal intercourse (usually based on accusations by a wife). Sodomy is not broken out in the statistics based on the 44,701 cases because in 1509 the Suprema ordered that “no action be taken against homosexuals except when heresy was involved.”⁶⁷ That is, action was to be taken only when claims were made that sodomy was not a sin. Consequently, the Inquisition of Castile “never again exercised jurisdiction over sodomy,”⁶⁸ although the Inquisition of Aragon continued to do so. However, the published data are based only on the cities of Barcelona, Valencia, and Saragossa (1560–1700). Of the 1,829 cases of sexual offences in these three cities, sodomy prosecutions made up 38 percent.⁶⁹ In the execution data, also based only on the Aragon Inquisition (1540–1640), 167 were executed for “Sodomy,” as compared with 12 for “Superstition and Witchcraft” and 122 for being “Protestants.”⁷⁰

Even so, the Inquisition was more lenient toward sodomy (and most sexual offenses) than were the secular courts. Most of those convicted of sodomy by the Inquisition were whipped or given short terms in the galleys, and even many of the death sentences were commuted. By contrast, in this era the secular courts in most of Europe treated homosexuality as a capital offense.⁷¹ For example, from the twelfth century on, civil courts in France and Italy sent “sodomites” to the stake. Henry VIII requested that parliament pass an “anti-buggery” law and in 1533 a statute was passed making sodomy punishable by hanging. In 1730 Holland also made sodomy a capital crime. In practice, however, the general public was reluctant to accuse people of sodomy, and the courts, both secular and religious, were not eager to bring them to trial.

Bestiality accounted for 27 percent of the cases of sexual offences in the three cities, although sometimes bestiality was included in the sodomy category rather than being separated. This offense usually involved young, single men, often those employed as herders, although several women also were convicted of sex with pet dogs. Bestiality was “almost invariably punished ruthlessly”⁷² by the Inquisition. But even here, as in all other cases involving sexual offences, “penalties to women remained far milder than those punishing male sexuality.”⁷³

Book Burning

IT IS TRUE THAT the Inquisition did burn some books. Many of these contained theological heresies such as Lutheran doctrines, but very few, if any, scientific books were burned—the Spanish never even put Galileo’s works on their list of forbidden books.⁷⁴ It seems of particular interest that of the books that the Inquisition did burn, most were condemned as pornographic!⁷⁵ It seems that although the first printed books were Bibles and prayer books, quite soon printers discovered an eager, if underground, market for smut.⁷⁶

Conclusion

GREAT HISTORICAL MYTHS DIE hard even when there is no vested resistance to new evidence. But in this case, many recent writers continue to spread the traditional myths about this “holy terror” even though they are fully aware of the new findings.⁷⁷ They do so because they are determined to show that religion, and especially Christianity, is a dreadful curse upon humanity. So these writers casually dismiss the new studies as written by “apologists”⁷⁸ and go on as before about the sadistic monsters in black robes.