Spanish Inquisition

The coat of arms of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (Spanish: Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición), commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition (Spanish: Inquisición española), was established in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

See Alhambra Decree.

It began toward the end of the Reconquista and was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control. It became the most substantive of the three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition along with the Roman Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition. The "Spanish Inquisition" may be defined broadly as operating in Spain and in all Spanish colonies and territories, which included the Canary Islands, the Kingdom of Naples, and all Spanish possessions in North, Central, and South America. According to modern estimates, around 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offences during the three-century duration of the Spanish Inquisition, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed (~2.7% of all cases).

The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism. The regulation of the faith of newly converted Catholics was intensified after the royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1502 ordering Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave Castile, resulting in hundreds of thousands of forced conversions, the persecution of conversos and moriscos, and the mass expulsions of Jews and of Muslims from Spain. The Inquisition was abolished in 1834, during the reign of Isabella II, after a period of declining influence in the preceding century.

Previous Inquisition Persecuting Cathars

The Inquisition was created through papal bull, Ad Abolendam, issued at the end of the 12th century by Pope Lucius III to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France. There were a large number of tribunals of the Papal Inquisition in various European kingdoms during the Middle Ages through different diplomatic and political means. In the Kingdom of Aragon, a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition was established by the statute of Excommunicamus of Pope Gregory IX, in 1232, during the era of the Albigensian heresy, as a condition for peace with Aragon. The Inquisition was ill-received by the Aragonese, which led to prohibitions against insults or attacks on it. Rome was particularly concerned that the Iberian peninsula's large Muslim and Jewish population would have a 'heretical' influence on the Catholic population. Rome pressed the kingdoms to accept the Papal Inquisition after Aragon. Navarra conceded in the 13th century and Portugal by the end of the 14th, though its 'Roman Inquisition' was famously inactive. Castile refused steadily, trusting in its prominent position in Europe and its military power to keep the Pope's interventionism in check. By the end of the Middle Ages, England, due to distance and voluntary compliance, and the Castile (future part of Spain), due to resistance and power, were the only Western European kingdoms to successfully resist the establishment of the Inquisition in their realms.

Church of Rome in Spain

Historical accounts tell us that in 1492 after an eight-month siege culminating into the last stand, the Nasrid dynasty’s Muhammad XII of Granada finally surrendered the Alhambra Palace to the military forces of Isabella’s Crown of Castile and Ferdinand’s Crown of Aragon. This effectively ended the Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula, where peace and celebration for the victory was very short lived, as the ambitious Catholic Monarchs and Cardinals were determined to cement their power as statesmen for the Church of Rome. The Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella took the Alhambra complex to be their royal court and shortly after issued the Alhambra Decree, known as the Edict of Expulsion. Thus, the aggressive campaign of religious persecution to identify all heretics against the Church of Rome in Spain began with the Alhambra Decree, in which the inexpressible horrors of the Spanish Inquisition were carried out as an angelic human genocide in all Spanish territories and colonies.

The Spanish Inquisition was modeled upon the Medieval Inquisition formed within the Catholic Church whose outward public goals were to combat heresy, but more accurately were created to hunt down and destroy the groups that had the original Christos Essene Templar Law of One teachings taught by Yeshua the Christ. The Celtic Church and their Aryan teachers from Hyperborean lineages had long been a presence throughout the coastline of the Mediterranean, and the Alhambra Palace was another original temple site built for meditation with the Unis Mundi configuration in the underground caves and tunnel system. Thus, the first Inquisition was created through papal bull, issued by the Pope to attack the spiritual family of Cathars with the Albigensian Crusade in southern France. The Spanish Inquisition historical narrative focuses upon the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, but more accurately, it was the persecution of any religious beliefs outside of the Church of Rome as controlled by the Black Suns, with an emphasis on continuing the Blood Sacrifice human holocausts, while hunting down and destroying the Christos Essene Templars.

See Also

Alhambra’s Gridwork Synopsis

Unus Mundus