The Inquisition

The inquisition began as a legal procedure before it was an institution: inquisitio, the inquiry, in which a judge investigates on his own authority rather than waiting for an accuser. Gregory IX commissioned the first standing papal inquisitors in the 1230s, largely Dominicans, against the Cathar heresy of Languedoc in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade, and the medieval tribunals spread with the mendicant orders, armed with manuals such as Bernard Gui's and, from 1252, with papal authorisation of torture.

The Spanish Inquisition was a different creature: founded in 1478 at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella and answerable to the crown, it was aimed not at Protestants, who scarcely existed yet, but at conversos, Jews converted to Christianity whose sincerity the crown doubted. Under its first inquisitor general, Tomas de Torquemada, the tribunal's early decades were its bloodiest, entangled with the expulsion of Spain's Jews in 1492; the moriscos, converted Muslims, followed as its second great target. Its councils, the Suprema, its regional tribunals and its public autos de fe ran for three and a half centuries until final abolition in 1834, extending to Spanish America, while Portugal and Goa kept parallel tribunals.

Rome's own Congregation of the Holy Office, founded in 1542 against Protestantism, was the tribunal that burned Giordano Bruno in 1600 and tried Galileo in 1633, and its Index of Forbidden Books censored European thought until 1966.

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.