The Inquisition
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The Inquisition
The Inquisition was set up in 1233 as a Roman Catholic tribunal to investigate and punish heresy.
Originally set up by the Dominican order, it aimed to suppress the Albigensian heresy in France, it later to spread throughout medieval Europe (France, Italy, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire), the Americas (Mexico, Peru, etc.) and other parts of the world where Catholicism held sway (Goa, Philippines, etc.) and was sanctioned by the popes.
Its trials were conducted in secret and, from the time of Pope Innocent IV, torture was used to obtain confessions. Punishments ranged from fines to flogging and imprisonment to execution by burning at the stake.
The most severe form of the inquisition was the Spanish Inquisition, which was founded in 1478 and abolished in the 19th century.
There were many thousands of victims of the Inquisition. Some of the more famous have included the scientist Galileo Galilei and the philosopher Giordano Bruno.
Galileo before the Holy Office [Inquisition], a 19th century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury
Books on the Inquisition
Good Websites on the Inquisition
- The Inquisition
- Detailed essay on the history of the Inquisition. The article makes for uncomfortable reading -- the accused being cast into secret prisons, tortured, rarely acquitted, and then executed. This article was originally published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th Edition (1875).
- Secret Files of the Inquisition
- Based on previously unreleased secret documents from European Archives including the Vatican, Secret Files of the Inquisition unveils the incredible true story of the Catholic Church's 500-year struggle to remain the world's only true Christian religion.
- The Inquisition
- "Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast." (Will Durant, "The Age of Faith")
Galileo vs. the Inquisition
"I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition! But they behave to me in order that I may become the ignoramus and the fool of Italy..."
-- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Italian physicist and astronomer, letter to Fr. Vincenzo Renieri, c. 1633
An auto-da-fe (Inquisition execution), c. 1495
Latest News on the Inquisition
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byA Famous Reply to the Judges of the Inquisition
"Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it."
-- Italian philosopher, astronomer, mystic and martyr, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), reply to his Inquisition judges upon his conviction as a heretic, prior to his transfer to the civil authorities for execution, 16 February 1600
