The Inquisition in Spain ran through the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, ending only in the time of Napoleon, whose brother was appointed King of Spain. But its nature changed after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Its rate of executions slowed, and at the same time, it became an institution built into the society. Moreover, the Inquisition expanded, first to include converted Muslims, then to include “heretics” of any type in Spanish-ruled lands, including the Netherlands. As it expanded, it gained institutional power, somewhat independent of the kings or Pope who nominally controlled it.
First and perhaps most importantly, Tomas de Torquemada became too old and visibly weak to carry out his duties as Grand Inquisitor. In 1494, the Pope appointed four assistants whose mandate included reining in the runaway Inquisition. Torquemada died in 1498. He had presided over the most hysterical stage of the program, when fear grew and they were careless about due process.
His successor was Diego de Deza, Archbishop of Seville and tutor to Ferdinand and Isabella’s heir, who had just died. Deza had a record of getting Muslims and Jews to convert using strong-arm harassment tactics, which to him would have seemed quite appropriate. He hated Conversos; all the more so, since it turned out he had Jewish heritage on his mother’s side. Nobody hates as much as someone who’s trying to separate himself from, in this case, his Jewish heritage. People lodged complaints against him, saying he enriched himself by confiscating property, and that his officials had “no regard for God or justice.”
One of Deza’s changes was to skip the thirty-day period in which people might confess. After 1500, the Edict of Grace was not proclaimed, but instead, they went straight to the Edict of Faith, which asked for denunciations. By Deza’s time, types of torture had been institutionalized, mostly ways of putting stress and pain on joints with weights or with the “rack.” They were not supposed to cause permanent harm or bleeding, and canon law when followed put time limits on periods of pain.
Those who were convicted ended the process in an auto-da-fe, which is actually an anachronism since the term is Portuguese for “act of faith,” and the Portuguese Inquisition didn’t start up until after 1530. It was a celebration of the Mass, but during the ceremony they had confessions and penances, including some death sentences. Perhaps more and more often as time went by, executions by burning were carried out immediately, so that “auto-da-fe” has come to mean “public burning.”
In 1499, Archbishop Cisneros came to Granada to speed up the conversion of the Muslims. As the prelate of Toledo, he had already been involved in reforming the Franciscans, who had become soft and corrupt. Many of them were living in luxury and some kept concubines. Cisneros required them to be celibate, to live in their parishes, and to actually preach and confess. Some monks fled to North Africa and converted to Islam rather than give up their women. Cisneros was austere by nature, so he had no sympathy for them.
When Cisneros arrived in Granada, he had no sympathy for the Muslims there, either. He announced there would be a mass conversion, and it began with burning books in Arabic—except for medical books. Thousands of manuscripts went into a bonfire in the public square. His action was a clear violation of the Alhambra Treaty, which had promised no such destruction of Muslim culture. The countryside rose in rebellion. That actually made things easier for the crown, since open war ended the treaty. As the rebels were killed, the survivors were given the choice of death, conversion, or expulsion.
By 1500, Cisneros stated proudly that there were no Muslims and no mosques left in the city. (A few years later, he led an expedition to attempt conquest of Oran, in North Africa. The separation between continents that we take for granted was not at all evident to people at the time.) In 1502, a decree from Queen Isabella made it official: Islam was outlawed.
The Inquisition continued to expand. While the king and queen had begun the process, the Inquisition’s leadership took control and made their own decisions, such as cutting out the Edict of Grace. Some Muslims had converted to Christianity before this, but after 1502, they were in the same position as the Jewish converts. The number of “Moriscos,” ex-Muslims, went way up. The Inquisition began trying some of them.
Moriscos had to leave their doors open on Thursday night and Friday morning, to make sure they were not doing ritual bathing before prayers. Soldiers on routine patrols would look into each house. Now there was a death penalty for practicing either Judaism or Islam, so anyone caught with a Koran or Talmud, or carrying out Jewish or Muslim slaughter rules, or doing any other practices, was arrested.
Isabella died in 1504, Ferdinand in 1516. The Grand Inquisitor, Cisneros, became the Regent until Ferdinand’s grandson Charles in the Netherlands could come take over. Cisneros was a strict, efficient Regent. In one year, he set up permanent courts (with a center at Madrid, perhaps the first step toward Madrid’s becoming the national capital) and a standing army. He demolished castles in Navarre, in case anyone up north thought about rebellion. He died within days of young Charles’ arrival.
The Spanish Inquisition became more bureaucratic after that time. Its Castilian and Aragonese branches united, perhaps the first step in the young king’s new model of “Spain” as a unified country. The Inquisition’s rate of convictions and executions dropped from a high of 40% to single digits, particularly during the reign of the fifth Grand Inquisitor. While any number of deaths for “wrong beliefs” is too many, 3% is much less like mass hysteria than is 40%, and it is within a margin that people can learn to live with.
Cultural Muslims (Moriscos) got better at hiding the marks of Islam, and after a few generations there was no real difference (if there ever had been). The ruling elite families found it much harder to hide, so covert Muslim faith was more likely to linger among the poor, especially in the countryside. By the time a 1609 royal decree expelled even the Moriscos, it’s likely that some of their persecutors were their own descendants, now their fiercest enemies—-such is human nature. That’s how it had been among the Jews, too.
Benzion Netanyahu’s scholarship on 15th century Spain argues that testing these people for doctrine was only ever a fig leaf. The real motive, he writes, was ethnic cleansing and reckless exercise of power. The more power the Inquisition had, the more it could take. The more power it had, the more it could tell the king what to do. Ferdinand had been reluctant to destroy his economy by expelling Jews and Muslims, and moreover, it was a specific breach of 1492’s treaty that ceded Granada to the crown. By being cruel and unfair, the Inquisition provoked some Muslims to rebel, and then the king could claim that the treaty was broken. And so ended eight centuries of Muslim life in Spain.