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No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 3:59 pm
by Kurt
to have such a low number of executions.

I was brushing up on it in Wikipedia trying to find reference to rumors I seem to remember "reading somewhere" about how Jews fled Spain to New Mexico, essentially went native and years later Cowboys found a tribe that played with Dredles (my recollection of what I read back then is sketchy).

So out of a total of 87000 trials there were 1080 executions. Most trials got "suspended" meaning the defendant was not acquitted but was released from jail and not bothered. Most of the executed (the term was called "Relaxation" then for some morbid reason probably based on a medieval Latin term that is not used at all today) were "Crypto-Jews" ..meaning they had converted or their family had after the reconquest but were still accused of practicing Judaism. There were also rumors of an underground Jewish Cult withing the church that was attracting non-jews but no mention if any of the people "Relaxed" were of this sort.

Homosexuals got off pretty well. Sodomy was a Relaxable offense but it covered everything from rape, child molestation to getting it on with goats. I came accross one figure from 1478 to 1501 (the traditional baddie time) that 87 people were Relaxed for Sodomy. (I like that term for burning at the stake). One piece I read was that 11 people in the "other" category were straight up homosexuals and the rest fell into the criminal to weird category of sodomy.

So, still a bad event. Burning at the stake is never good. Torture to get a confession is never good but on the whole The Spanish Inquisition was not the mass slaughter I expected it to be.

It was definitely used as propaganda for years by Protestants. The Reformation was about to start and the printing press was already 60 years old and gripes in the North about the power the Southern church had were popular. So 1000 people executed and thousands tortured became a bit of a rallying cry for hundreds of years.

The odd thing is that one rarely ever hears about the Rebellion of Muntzer and the Anabaptists. Since this was a Protestant revolt, no Gothic novels were written of its crimes. In fact Muntzer and the Peasant Revolt earned the praise of Frederic Engels who liked them so much he wrote a book on it called The Peasant War in Germany. So we had some ignoring of an unpleasant event by Protestants and we had the praising of an unpleasant event by Communists, both groups used the Inquisition to villainize the Catholic church.

How many dead in Muntzer's Peasant War? No one knows for sure but it is at least over 100,000 in battle alone. This does not include the amount of people who starved to death because the Anabaptists lived as a collective...a Military collective who looted and placed food and items in an area where all their members had access to them. When food ran out, they conquered another area. Perhaps it was 200,000 dead.

The rebellion went on for two years. The Inquisition went on for 23. The conservative number of deaths for the Peasant Revolt is 100,000. The Liberal number of deaths for the Inquisition is 5000 but the documented deaths are 1080 for 23 years.

The Spanish Inquisition was not good at all but I , and others have been duped into thinking it was one of more horrid events in that period of Europe. Compared to the Anabaptist Peasant War (which is praised by some) it really was nothing.

Re: No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Fri Feb 11, 2011 12:35 am
by Kestrel
Thanks for the interesting reads, both of and inspired by this post.

Re: No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Fri Feb 11, 2011 9:56 pm
by Caliban
Imagine the disappointment of the accused who were told "You have to be relaxed for sodomy, then its a roasting for you"

Re: No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2012 1:45 am
by Spartan Actual
Kurt,
As a descendant of Jews who fled the inquisition for (then) Ottoman controlled Rhodes, I have to ask where your stats come from? The fewest executions I've found from a credible (non-revisionist) source is 2,250.

Re: No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2012 2:52 am
by Kurt
Spartan Actual wrote:Kurt,
As a descendant of Jews who fled the inquisition for (then) Ottoman controlled Rhodes, I have to ask where your stats come from? The fewest executions I've found from a credible (non-revisionist) source is 2,250.


Beats me. I wrote it 1 1/2 years ago.

My main point with it was that The Spanish Inquisition, though bad, was not as bad as the Anabaptist and Peasant Revolt in Germany. So I tend to think the focus on the Spanish Inquisition is really old-school Protestant propaganda that was then adopted by other groups as it suited them (like Gays vs. the Catholic church).

The Peasant Revolt and the 30 years war was certainly worse for Jews than the Inquisition as the Jews in the Low German speaking areas were Shtleled and Ghettoised if they were not slaughtered (not given a chance to flee like the more enlightened bigots of Spain and Medieval England demanded).

To get an idea how many died in an era where no one cared about counting casualties remember that the two people's most affected by Tays Sachs Syndrome are Yiddish speaking ultra religious Jews and Low-German speaking ultra Religious Amish people. Both groups self isolated and both groups descended from people killed by both Catholic and Protestant armies.

Re: No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Fri Jun 22, 2012 12:05 am
by Spartan Actual
Gottcha.

Re: No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..

PostPosted: Fri Jun 22, 2012 6:34 pm
by Sri Lanky
I happen to be descended from both Yiddish speaking Jews and Low German speaking people. I have no idea how religious they were. As a matter of fact you guys probably know more about their history than I do. So many of us have moved on from that isolation period.

Thank God

; )