Inquisition, (Church history) ecclesiastical jurisdiction erected by the Roman See in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, and even in the Indies, for extirpating Jews, Moors, infidels and heretics.

This jurisdiction, having its birth in 1200, was adopted by the count of Toulouse in 1229, and confided to the Dominicans by pope Gregory IX in 1233. Innocent IV extended its power in 1251 into all Italy, except for Naples. Spain saw itself entirely subjugated in 1448 [1] under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabelle. Portugal adopted it under John III in the year 1557, according to the model received by the Spanish. [2] Twelve years earlier, in 1545, Paul III had formed the congregation of this tribunal under the name of the holy office ; and Sixtus V confirmed this congregation in 1588. Thus the inquisition , while always directly stemming from the court of Rome, was planted despite many contradictions in a great number of the states of christendom.

Let us go over all these facts with M. Voltaire, and in greater detail, but certainly such as will bore no one. The canvas he has traced is done in the hand of a master; one could never make too many copies.

It was in the wars against the Albigensians, that around the year 1200 the pope Innocent III erected this terrible tribunal which judges the thoughts of men; and with no consideration for the bishops, the natural arbiters in trials over doctrine, the court of Rome left judgment to the dominicans and the cordeliers. [3]

These first inquisitors had the right to cite any heretic, to excommunicate him, to grant indulgences to any prince who exterminated the condemned, to reconcile to the Church, to tax penitents, and to receive their promises of repentance in cash.

A bizarre turn of events, which so often leads to contradictions in human politics, resulted in the most violent enemy of the popes becoming the most severe protector of this tribunal.

Emperor Frederick II, accused by the pope first of being a Muslim, then of being an atheist, thought to cleanse himself of all reproach by taking the inquisitors under his protection; he even granted four edicts at Pavia in 1244, by which he ordered secular judges to deliver to the flames all those who had been condemned by the inquisitors as obstinate heretics, and to leave in a perpetual prison those who the inquisition declared repentant. Frederick II, despite this policy, was no less persecuted, and popes ever since have used the arms he gave them against the rights of the empire.

In 1255 pope Alexander III established the inquisition in France under king St. Louis. The guardian of the Paris Cordeliers, and the provincial of the Dominicans were the grand inquisitors. They were required by the bull of Alexander III to consult with the bishops, but they were not subject to them. This strange jurisdiction, granted to men who had vowed to renounce the world, outraged the clergy and laity to the point where soon universal revolt left these monks with nothing but a useless title.

In Italy the popes had more credibility, for no matter how they were disobeyed in Rome, and how distant they were from it over the long term, they were nevertheless still at the head of the Guelph faction, against that of the Ghibellines. They used this inquisition against the empire’s supporters; for in 1302 [4] pope John XXII had proceedings initiated by the monk inquisitors against Matthew Visconti, lord of Milan, whose crime was being attached to the emperor Louis of Bavaria. Devotion of a vassal to his sovereign was declared heresy; the houses of Este and of Malatesta were treated in the same way, and for the same reason; and if the punishment did not follow the sentence, it is merely because it was easier for popes to have inquisitors than to have armies.

The more this tribunal took up authority, and the more the bishops saw themselves being relieved of a right which seemed to pertain to them, they vigorously denounced it; nevertheless they were allowed by the popes to be nothing but the monks’ assistants.

By the end of the thirteenth century in 1289, Venice had already received the inquisition with this difference, that whereas elsewhere it was wholly dependant on the pope, in the state of Venice it was entirely subordinate to the senate. [The senate] took the wise precaution of ensuring that fines and confiscations did not pertain to the inquisitors. They hoped thus to moderate their zeal, by removing the temptation to enrich themselves by their judgments: but since the desire to assert the rights of one’s ministry is a human passion as strong as avarice, the machinations of the inquisitors obliged the senate for a long time thereafter, that is until the sixteenth century, to mandate that the inquisition should never be able to undertake a procedure without the assistance of three senators. By this regulation, and by many others of like prudence, the authority of this tribunal was annihilated at Venice through having been avoided in the first place. See Fra Paolo [Sarpi] on this topic .

One kingdom where it seems that the inquisition managed to establish itself with the utmost ease and power is precisely that where it should never have been allowed to enter, by which I mean the kingdom of Naples. The sovereigns of this state and those of Sicily believed themselves by right, due to papal concessions, to enjoy ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Since the roman pontiff and the king always clashed over appointment of inquisitors, none were ever named; and for the first time the people actually benefited from their masters’ quarrels. If in the end the inquisition was authorized in Sicily, after having been so in Spain by Ferdinand and Isabelle in 1478, it remained in Sicily, still more than in Castille, a privilege of the crown, and not a roman tribunal; for in Sicily it is the king who is pope.

It had already long been accepted in Arragon; there it languished just as in France, lacking purpose, lacking organization, and nearly forgotten.

But after the conquest of Granada, this tribunal deployed a force and a rigor throughout Spain such as ordinary tribunals had never had. It must be that the Spanish mind had then something more merciless about it than that of other nations. This can be seen in the deliberate cruelties they committed in the new world: it can be seen above all in the excess of atrocity they imposed in the exercise of a jurisdiction where the Italians, its inventors, had applied much more mildness. The popes had erected these tribunals through policy, and the Spanish inquisitors added the most horrific barbarity.

Once Mahomet II had subdued Greece, he and his successors left the conquered peoples to live in peace in their religion; and the Arabs as masters of Spain had never forced their Christian subjects to receive Islam. But after the capture of Granada, cardinal Ximenez wanted all the Moors to become Christians, whether because he was carried away by zeal or because of his ambition to gain a new people under his primacy.

It was an undertaking completely opposed to the treaty under which the Moors had surrendered, and it would take time to make it succeed. Ximenez nevertheless wanted to convert the Moors just as swiftly as Granada had been taken; they were subjected to preaching, they were persecuted, they revolted; they were suppressed, and they were forced to receive baptism. Ximenez had fifty thousand of them given this sign of a religion in which they did not believe.

The Jews included in the treaty made with the kings of Granada experienced no more indulgence than the Moors. There were many in Spain. They were what they are everywhere else, the agents of commerce. Far from being turbulent, this profession can only be sustained by a spirit of peace. There are more than twenty-eight thousand Jews authorized by the pope to be in Italy; there are nearly 280 synagogues in Poland. The city of Amsterdam alone possesses about fifteen thousand Hebrews, though it could assuredly carry on its commerce without their aid. The Jews appeared no more dangerous in Spain, and the taxes which could be imposed on them were reliable resources for the government. It is thus very difficult to attribute the persecution they suffered to wise policy.

The inquisition undertook proceedings against them, and against the Muslims. How many Mahometan and Jewish families preferred to leave Spain at this time rather than endure the rigor of this tribunal? And how many subjects did Ferdinand and Isabelle lose? Certainly those of the sect who were least to be feared, as they preferred flight to revolt. Those who remained pretended to be Christian; but the grand inquisitor Torquemada brought queen Isabelle to see all these disguised Christians as men whose possessions should be confiscated and lives made forfeit.

This Dominican Torquemada, later cardinal, [5] gave to the tribunal of the Spanish inquisition that juridical form which it retains today, and which is opposed to all human laws. Over fourteen years he tried more than 80 thousand men, and had five or six thousand of them burned with all the of the pomp of the most august celebrations.

All that has been reported of peoples who used to sacrifice men to the deity does not come close to these executions accompanied by religious ceremonies. The Spanish did not at first fully realize the horror, since it was their ancient enemies, and Jews who were being sacrificed; but soon they themselves became victims: for once the dogmas of Luther burst forth, the few citizens who were suspected of holding them were immolated; the format of these procedures became an infallible means of getting rid of people.

Here is this format: the accused never confront their accusers, and there is no informant who is not heard; a criminal shamed by justice, a child, a courtesan, these are [considered to be] serious accusers. The son may testify against his father, the wife against her husband, a brother against his brother; the accused must in the end become his own prosecutor, guessing, and confessing the crime he is supposed to have committed and of which he is often ignorant. This hitherto unheard-of procedure, maintained up to the present day, made Spain tremble. Distrust took hold of every spirit; there were no more friends, no more community; brother feared his brother, father his son, wife her husband; thus silence became the defining characteristic of a nation born with all the natural vivacity of a warm and fertile climate; the cleverest quickly became the inquisition ’s constables, known as its familiars, preferring to be in its orbit rather than exposed to its torments.

The establishment of this tribunal must also be attributed to that profound ignorance of salutary philosophy, in which Spain still remains plunged while Germany, the North, England, France, Holland, and even Italy have discovered so many truths, and have expanded the sphere of our knowledge. Descartes philosophized freely in his retirement in Holland, while the great Galileo at the age of 80 languished in the prisons of the inquisition , for having discovered the movement of the earth. Human nature is never so vile as when ignorance is armed with power; but these sad effects of the inquisition are but little compared to those public sacrifices known as auto-da fé , acts of faith, and the horrors which precede them.

It is a priest in his surplice; [or] it is a monk vowed to charity and kindness, who in vast and deep dungeons applies the cruelest of tortures to men. Then it is to a theatre set up in a public square, that all the condemned are led to the stake following a procession of monks and confraternities. They sing, they say mass, and they kill men. An asiatic arriving in Madrid on the day of such an execution would not be able to tell whether it was a celebration, a religious ceremony, a sacrifice or a slaughterhouse; and it is all of these together. Kings, whose mere presence elsewhere suffices to grant mercy to a criminal, attend this spectacle on a throne less elevated than that of the inquisitor, and see their own subjects perish in the flames. Montezuma was reproached for making burnt offerings of captives to his gods; what would he have said if he had seen an auto-da fé ?

These executions are today less common than before; but reason, which shines through with such difficulty when fanaticism is on the throne, has not yet been able to abolish them.

The inquisition was not introduced in Portugal until around the year 1557, and even when that country was not yet subject to the Spaniards, it at first suffered all the contradictions which its name alone should produce; but in the end it was established, and its jurisprudence was the same at Lisbon as at Madrid. The grand inquisitor is named by the king, and confirmed by the pope. The local tribunals of this office which calls itself holy are subject in [both] Spain and Portugal to the tribunal of the capital. The inquisition had in each of these two states the same severity and the same attention to making known its power.

In Spain, after the death of Charles the fifth, it dared to bring that emperor’s former confessor to trial: Constantine Ponce, who perished in a dungeon, and whose effigy was later burned in an auto-da fé .

In Portugal John of Braganza, [6] having wrested his country from Spanish domination, wanted also to deliver it from the inquisition ; but he succeeded only in depriving the inquisitors of their confiscations; they declared him excommunicate after his death, and the queen his widow [7] was obliged to beg them to grant the corpse an absolution as ridiculous as it was shameful: for by this absolution he was declared guilty.

When the Spaniards passed over to America, they brought the inquisition with them. The Portuguese introduced it in the West Indies, [8] immediately after it was authorized at Lisbon.

The history of the inquisition of Goa is well known. If this jurisdiction elsewhere oppresses the natural law, in Goa it was also contrary to good policy. The Portuguese went to the Indies only to trade. Commerce and the inquisition are wholly incompatible. If it had been set up in London and in Amsterdam, these cities would be deserted and miserable; indeed when Philip II wanted to introduce it in the provinces of Flanders, the interruption of commerce was once of the principal causes of the revolution.

France and Germany have happily been preserved from this scourge; they have suffered horrible wars of religion, but wars finish in the end, and the inquisition once established seems to become eternal.

Nevertheless the king of Portugal has finally shaken off his yoke by following the example of Venice; he wisely ordered, to annihilate all power of the inquisition in his states, 1. that the prosecuting procurator general must communicate the articles of the accusation to the accused, along with the names of witnesses; 2. that the accused must have the freedom to choose a lawyer, and to confer with him; 3. he moreover forbade execution of any inquisition sentence until it could be confirmed by his council. Thus the plans of John of Braganza have been accomplished a century later by one of his successors.

Undoubtedly some excesses of horrors have been imputed to this so justly detested tribunal, which it did not always commit; but it would be inept to raise only dubious facts against the inquisition , and worse still, to seek out lies with which to render it odious; it suffices to make known its spirit.

Let us bless the day when we in this kingdom had the joy of abolishing a jurisdiction so contrary to the independence of our kings, to the good of their subjects, to the liberties of the gallican church, in a word to all wise policy. The inquisition is a tribunal which must be rejected in all governments. In monarchy, it can only make hypocrites, informants and traitors. In republics, it can only form dishonest people. In a despotic state, it is as destructive as that state itself. It has served only to lose for the pope one of the brightest jewels in his crown, the United Provinces; and elsewhere to burn, both cruelly and uselessly, a great number of unfortunates.

This iniquitous tribunal, invented to extirpate heresy, is precisely that which most alienates all the protestants of the roman Church; it is for them an object of horror. They would prefer to die a thousand times than to than to submit to it, and the sulphured vestments of the holy office are the standard against which they are will always be seen united. Thus their skilful writers propose this question:

Without claiming to have resolved this problem, one may suggest, with the author of the esprit des lois , that if someone in the future should dare claim that in the eighteenth century all the peoples of Europe were civilized, the inquisition will be cited to prove that they were [in fact] for the most part barbarians; and the enduring verdict will be to castigate this century, and hatred will be borne against the nations which continued to adopt this hateful establishment.

1. Sic for 1484.

2. Sic; the Portuguese Inquisition was actually founded more than twenty years earlier. John III of Portugal died in 1557.

3. Ie: Franciscans.

4. Sic for 1320? John XXII r. 1316-1334.

5. Tomás de Torquemada (1420-1498) was a Dominican friar and the first Inquisitor General of Spain. He is here apparently conflated with his uncle cardinal Juan de Torquemada (1388-1468), also a Dominican, who wrote several treatises including one in defense of converted Jews.

6. King John IV of Portugal, r. 1640-1656.

7. Luisa de Guzman, d. 1666.

8. Sic. Presumably “east Indies” is meant, since this seems to be a reference to the Goan tribunal.