No one expects The Spanish Inquisition..
Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 3:59 pm
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.
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.