Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision

Chapter 2 - The Great Dispersion

P.13: "... the Inquisition that Ferdinand and Isabella set up a decade after the beginning of their reign came to play a signifcant part in national life, but at the beginning its horizons were limited and regional. The primary concern was with a tiny fragment of the population, the Christians of Jewish origin who lived in the southern corner of the peninsula." 1478 - papal bulls founded Spanish Inquisition 1492 - expulsion of Jews from Spain under the alternative of being converted into Christians

Chapter 4 - An Enduring Crisis

P.90: "Though often presented as such, ... there is no reason for thinking of the Inquisition as sinister tyranny imposed on an unwilling people [of Spain]. It never enjoyed enough power to become a tyranny, and it was brought into being by a particular social situation - the converso question - that in the relevant areas counted on substantial popular support. In some regions its imact was deadly; in others people never saw the tribunal at any moment of their lives. It fulfilled a role - as guardian against foreign ideas, as keeper of public morality, as arbiter between factions, as tribunal for small causes - that no other institution fulfilled. Moreover, over long periods of time and substantial areas of the country, it was inactive and all but disappeared."

Chapter 3 - The Coming of the Inquisition

P.49: "The harvest of heretics reaped by the early Inquisition owed its succsess to deliberate falsification or the completely indiscriminate way in which residual Jewish customs were interpreted as being heretical. Though it can certainly be indentified in the period after the forced conversions of 1492, there was no systematic "converso religion" in the 1480s to justify the creation of an inquisition" [in 1478].

P.67: "The period of most intense persecution of conversos [Jews converted into Christians] was between 1480 and 1530." P.68: "Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1520, it is unlikely that more than 2000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition. The final death toll may have been smaller than historians once believed, but the overall impact was certainly devastating for the cultural minority most directly affected. The reign of terror had an inevitable consequence."