The Church

The Inquisition by Goya

The Inquisition had a monetary as well as a religious drive.  Successful businessmen who also happened to be Jews were envied and distrusted.  Many Jews converted to Christianity, to no avail, as the excesses of religious zeal were put to double use.  Jews were denounced as heretics, they were arrested and expelled from the country, and their money was confiscated into the coffers of the state.

The Moors were conquered at Granada, but the victory had emptied the treasuries of the Spanish kingdom.  The power of the Church, never so great as when it stood with cross and sword over the fallen Moslem, had at that moment insisted upon the expulsion from the realms of every person professing the Jewish faith, and thus the country was deprived of a people not only possessing commercial riches but constant producers of national property, a people sober, dexterous, and thrifty.

John Boyd Thacher, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains, 172

The country may have been deprived of productive citizens, as Thacher points out, but the treasuries benefited.  Indeed, some of the confiscated wealth was used in funding later voyages of exploration.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Inquisition.html

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

The Church

Fifteenth century Book of Hours

During the first three centuries after the birth of Jesus, Christianity had no concern for the punishment of those who disagreed with the precepts.  But gradually throughout Europe a notion took hold that the divinity of Jesus Christ was a doctrine that all human beings must believe in.  Unlike many other cultures of the world which accept the reality of different belief systems, Christianity developed at its base a compulsive universality, the idea that “Christian truths were absolute and permitted no deviations among believers, non-believers, or peoples who had not yet encountered the faith” (Mohawk, 43).

From 1057 on, popes tried to unify all of Europe under their authority.  In addition to the reconquest and the Crusades, the major military attempts to expel heretics from European-claimed territory, another device was instituted: the Inquisition, which all the European countries used in various forms to rid their lands of heresy.

The Spanish, after an initial hostility towards its excesses, gradually adopted and greatly refined the methods of the Inquisition.  At first the primary targets were Moors and Jews, even those who had converted to Christianity (converses), who were held in general suspicion because of their wealth and power.

When heretics were convicted, by a separate court of the Inquisition, for statements, writings, or actions that didn’t follow stringent church laws, they lost their property, their citizenship, and quite often their lives.  The accused were presumed quality; they were not told who had denounced them, and they were strongly persuaded to confess and denounce other “heretics.”  Torture, although originally unpopular in Spain, gradually became the main method of extracting confessions and was applied widely until the eighteenth century.

The Inquisition spread throughout the Spanish colonial empire hand in hand with the Catholic faith.  Later, in Spain as in the rest of Europe, it was directed against Protestants.

Church Promotion of Violence

Inquisition  

However, the message of the Inquisition was not just for Jews, or for Moors, but for everyone:

The church-sponsored violence known as the Inquisition…went, methodically and heartlessly, after any variety of heretic or dissenter, reformer or mystic, attempting to do by the sword—or by the torturer’s rack and the auto-da-fe (public burning—what it could not do by word or prayer, under whose jurisdiction countless millions were imprisoned, by whose decree countless hundreds of thousands were killed.

The Inquisition in Spain was the most brutal of all in the fifteenth century, in part because it was, uniquely, under the control of the crowns of Castile and Aragon.  It was in fact the only truly national institution within their territory and as such their single most potent (and indeed most popular) instrument for creating the nation-state that was to be Spain.

The Inquisition, under royal direction from 1483, was the one whose strictures Cristobal Colon would have been careful to heed, and whose ministrations, evidenced in clouds of smoke billowing from town squares throughout the land, he would have witnessed daily.

Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 33

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n1p-2_Chalmers.html