The Spanish Inquisition

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.