Inquisitions were normally a program run by priests who answered to the local bishop, who answered to the Pope. They were the answer to a very active concern: what about false teachers who might lead the illiterate astray? Inquisitions had been run, periodically, for several centuries in many places. They were guided by canon law which was based on Roman law, answerable to local bishops and the Pope. Most of the time, they imposed penance and re-educated heretics. Their worst punishment was exclusion from the Church, so that the offender was outside the protections of canon law.
This background helps us understand why the Inquisition in Spain became so infamous, because it didn’t follow this model. It was not overseen by bishops and the Pope, nor was it run by canon law, nor did it stop at imposing penances. Instead, it was run by a priest directly appointed by King Ferdinand and answerable only to him. As it ran and grew year after year, the Popes tried to stop it at times. It is probably a good example of how mass hysteria can create a feedback loop, magnifying the problem.
The original problem was that many Jews in Spain had converted but remained culturally tied to their Jewish relatives and communities. Since Jews had been closely associated with Muslim rulers, often serving as officials, they were viewed as a foreign “5th Column.” The converted Jews, Conversos, were additionally seen as traitors by their Jewish relatives. The Inquisition’s roots seem to lie here: the Conversos had many enemies on all sides. An Inquisition was needed to find the ones who were not fully converted and straighten them out.
Canon law had some basic protections for the accused built into it. For example, anonymous denunciations were not permitted. If torture were used to persuade someone to confess, the confession was thrown out if the person recanted it when the torture was over (as many Templars had done). There were some rudimentary standards of evidence. But in Spain’s Inquisition, canon law was not followed. Anonymous denunciations were permitted and encouraged, and torture was used freely. This Inquisition, instead of imposing education and penance, convicted heretics as traitors to the King, therefore to death. It also, not incidentally, confiscated their property and fired them from their jobs.
Like anything, it began small. In 1478, the Pope gave Ferdinand and Isabella authority to name inquisitors in Castile. In 1481, the first six heretics were burnt at the stake. The Pope opposed sending Inquisitors into Aragon, objecting in 1482 that already many people, especially powerless and poor ones, had been seized, tortured, convicted and executed without evidence and often falsely. The Pope was concerned that the Inquisition was sending souls straight to Hell, rather than saving them. But King Ferdinand threatened to take the Inquisition from the Pope altogether, so that’s when the infamous Torquemada, Isabella’s personal priest, was appointed, and it was clear that he answered only to the King. Two years later, the Pope announced an appeal process to Rome, but the King announced a death sentence for anyone who tried it. At that point, the Pope had no control.
Torquemada’s Inquisitors would come to your town, and its officials proclaimed a 30 day amnesty: confess and do penance, abjure your heresy, and you would be spared. Once enough Conversos had been convicted and burnt alive, thousands of others rushed to confess to something, just to stay on the safe side. As the numbers grew, so did the Inquisition, since the problem seemed to be bigger than they had supposed.
Abjuring your heresy was not as easy as it sounded. The penitent heretic first had to don a sackcloth robe with yellow crosses, then must turn informer on other Conversos. If he ever stopped cooperating, he’d be considered Relapso and executed. Meanwhile, as a penitent, he could not practice medicine or law, bear arms, keep a tavern, carve stone, travel by horse or cart, wear jewels, or grow a beard. The status of penitent heretic was inherited by the children and some grandchildren.
Meanwhile, anonymous denunciation were welcomed, and any evidence of Shabbat observance was accepted: did you see your neighbor stocking up on food the day before Shabbat? buying meat from a Jewish butcher? lighting candles? not having a smoke-trailing chimney on Shabbat itself? Denunciations within families were definitely encouraged, with records of husbands denouncing wives and vice versa, children their parents, and so on. It may have been a convenient way to end a bad marriage or remove a hated father with a large estate, sort of like Agatha Christie plot premises. And denouncing your work colleague? Way to get a promotion! Your neighbor? Sweet, that extra lot will come in handy when it’s at city auction. Many royal officials and private citizens got rich off the Inquisition.
How many Jewish-origin Catholics were convicted of heresy and burnt as traitors? One historian (Henry Kamen) estimates about 2000, total. Other estimates begin at 12,000 and start climbing to 30,000 and on. Some say millions. We can infer, I think correctly, that under Torquemada the Inquisition didn’t keep careful records. By contrast, the medieval Cathar Inquisition kept such good records that historians can use them to reconstruct societal conditions in those towns. The high numbers in this case are probably wrong, because we know that additionally, tens of thousands of Jews left or were baptized, and their total number was not that great. But even the lowball estimate is shocking in its implied rate of arrests, and it too is probably wrong (like Ibn Khaldun, modern historians have a bias toward rejecting big numbers).
The Inquisitors became convinced that Jews were seducing converts to slip back into Judaism. They told the King that there must be a final solution or it would keep getting worse. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella reluctantly agreed to expel all Jews. Not all Conversos, but all practicing Jews.
To put this into perspective, everyone had been expelling Jews for the last few decades. German cities expelled Jews in the 1420s, and cities in Italy were expelling them during the years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Medici family protected Jews in Florence, until their fall from power, and then Florence sent the Jews away. France and England had expelled them in previous centuries. So Jews were moving to Italian cities at first, then as these were closed, they were moving eastward to Austria and Poland. Poland and Bohemia didn’t really want Jews, but it needed them.
And, of course, Spanish Jews and Conversos had been fleeing all during the Inquisition and its precursors. The problem is that Spain had been a very good place to live, and many of these Jews had lived there since Roman times, like the Jews of the Rhine Valley. Emigrating might mean saving your life, but it could just as easily mean losing it to robbers, pirates, or starvation and exposure to weather. Arriving in a new place, it would take several generations to rebuild, and meanwhile your family was at the bottom, where survival was unlikely. If there was any way to placate the Inquisition and stay, it seemed safer.
Christopher Columbus may have been a Spanish Jew whose parents fled earlier, settling in Genoa, so that he could come from Genoa to seek funding from what would have been his king. Michel de Montaigne was a Jew; France had expelled its Jews in 1306, but apparently some refugees were able to settle there again. Montaigne’s family was not of original French Jewish (northern) extraction, but from Spain.
In parallel developments, Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint Aragonese-Castilian forces were just finishing off the last Muslim ruler, the Emir of Granada. So in 1492, a lot of people were about to sail the ocean blue.