Impacts Of The Spanish Inquisition

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The Impacts of the Inquisition Thousands of people have been murdered, humiliated, tortured, and horrifying maltreated in history. One of the longest and widespread killings started because of people who believed themselves to be expunging sinners and stopping people who dishonored Christ Jesus. Church courts and Christian leaders eventually adapted a systematic way to put heretics (those who contradicted the Church) on trial, convict them, and execute them in the name of God. Now, in modern times, we can see the horrible consequences and the inestimable loss of life that resulted from this systematic mode of “justice”. It's easy to condemn all of those who condemned others without any grounds. However, the frame of mind that many religious…show more content…
Pope Gregory IX created a court that was used to investigate suspected heretics in 1231. This court also used force to change the beliefs of the victims. The Inquisition (which can actually be described as relatively separate institutions) operated mainly in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The Spanish Inquisition is the more prominently known by us today. Who took up the job of leading this massive attempt at purification? A Roman Catholic priest named Tomas de Torquemada. Born in 1420, Tomas started off by becoming a Dominican friar Valladolid, where he was born. Torquemada eventually ended up serving as Queen Isabella of Spain's confessor, after she became the Queen with Ferdinand. Obviously concerned with the issue of heretical people within the land, Torquemada was made the chief official of the Inquisition in most Spanish lands in 1483. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were entrusting him with a huge amount of responsibility; the Church was the foundation of just about every law that Spanish had to follow. Any offense against the Church would have to be punished with severity and debarred from being taught anywhere else. Ferdinand and Isabella were no doubt strong believers in this institution, and they (along with Torquemada) were perhaps some of the most influential people to ever put their support behind the Spanish version of the Inquisition. Tomas' involvement shows its drastic consequences when we see statistics. Although there are many different records of how many people really did die due to the Inquisition, we can take these variances and interpret the basic results. Thousands of people were tried and murdered, whether truly innocent or not, by the courts of the Inquisition. Again, many sources state different information regarding those killed, but Torquemada's 15 years serving in the Inquisition courts show lots of deaths. As many as 2,000 to over 300,000

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