Few institutions carry a heavier legend, and the modern scholarship of the Inquisition is largely an argument with it. The black legend, built by Protestant polemic and Enlightenment retelling, pictured a limitless machine of torture and burning. The archival turn of the late twentieth century, led for Spain by Henry Kamen, found a slower and stranger institution: procedurally meticulous, obsessed with records, using torture less often than contemporary secular courts, and executing, across three and a half centuries, a number now reckoned in the low thousands rather than the legend's hundreds of thousands. Gustav Henningsen's study of the Basque witch panic sharpened the paradox: after the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frias demonstrated in 1614 that the evidence for witchcraft could not stand, the Spanish tribunal largely stopped burning witches while the secular courts of northern Europe burned on.
Revision is not rehabilitation, and the historians are careful to say so. The tribunal's targets were real people: conversos destroyed by rumour, moriscos expelled wholesale in 1609, mystics and reformers silenced, and a censorship that walled Spain off from much of European thought. The trials of Bruno and Galileo made the Roman tribunal the lasting emblem of the church against free inquiry.
The church itself has joined the reckoning: the Holy Office's archives were opened to scholars in 1998, and John Paul II's millennium apology of 2000 asked pardon for the use of violence in the service of truth.