The Spanish Inquisition
The Spanish crown obtains the right to establish its own inquisition, watching over baptised Jews.
A papal bull permits Ferdinand and Isabella to appoint inquisitors answerable to the crown rather than to Rome. The tribunal deals not with unbelievers as such but with the baptised: above all the conversos—Jews who had accepted Christianity after the pogroms of 1391 and later—suspected of keeping the commandments in secret. Proceedings are conducted in secrecy, testimony is extracted under torture among other means, and sentences are proclaimed at public autos-da-fé. After 1492, the expulsion of the Jews, and then of the Moriscos, the surveillance stretches across generations; the institution will be abolished only in the nineteenth century.
Sources
Documents of the period
- inquisition archives and royal decrees — the bull of 1478 and the records of the tribunals
Scholarship
- studies in Spanish history — the surveillance of the conversos and the road to the expulsion of 1492
Basis: documents and evidence.