History: The Inquisitors And The Spanish Inquisition

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The biggest problem with Inquisition history is who first, besides the Church itself, started writing how events developed. In the years around Napoleon Bonaparte’s wars with Europe, most of the Vatican’s archives about the Inquisition where sent to France and after the wars ended a great portion of these archives ended up in England. The Spanish Inquisition archives had a similar faith, due to several reformations and turmoil many of the archives ended up in hands of anti-regime people. In both cases, the people who had access to the archives wrote the history of the Inquisition by cherry-picking the worst cases and abuses, similar to how the Church at the beginning had only presented a positive view of it (Peters 263-286). The first critics …show more content…
This, also, is an exaggerated view. Ciappara states that “In most instances the inquisitors’ duty was simply to gather information for the holy congregation to decide…they were to take no decisions on their own, but only after they had informed the cardinals of the case and waiter for their directives” (451). Ciappara also stated that most of the times inquisitors were condemned by cardinals for being too harsh with them, and historians like Christopher Black are quick to point out that physicians were almost always present in the tortures and they were called beforehand to “[look] for natural causes and proved very reluctant to give a verdict on the supernatural” (458; 210). In short, these historians seem to point out the fact that the Inquisition was not the horrible death machine that it has been portrayed as for years. The exact same pattern can be seen in the Spanish Inquisition, careful examination of the archives show that “Only 1% of the 125,000 people tried by church tribunals as suspected heretics in Spain were executed” (Arie 1). Sophie Arie also states that experts concluded that thousands of the executions attributed to the Church were actually made by secular tribunals that acted without the Church’s consent and without following the procedures (1). Likewise, there has been countless stories of Inquisitors who went mad with power and started accusing people of ridicule heretic acts, such as Conrad of Marburg who accused a count of “riding on a crab in a diabolic rite”; but just as with many other cases, Conrad was declared unfit for his position soon after and the charges where concluded as groundless by an archbishop (Haught 64). From all this real, non-fictitious evidence it can be easily seen how the Inquisition has been deformed and exaggerated throughout the years. No one is able to deny that in
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