Chapter 6 The Spanish Inquisition and the Converso Challenge (c. 1480–1525): A Question of Race, Religion or Socio-political Ascendancy?
Helen Rawlings
1 Introduction
The Spanish Inquisition, established by papal bull on 1 November 1478, was originally set up to deal with a specific group of individuals known as conversos – Jews who had converted to Christianity either voluntarily or un- der duress in the wake of rising anti-Semitic tensions in society and who were commonly regarded as being insincere in their new faith and reverting back to their former one. At the beginning of the reign of Ferdinand and Isa- bel (1469–1516), backsliding Jews were deemed to represent a major potential threat to the stability of the new Catholic state, recently emerged from the long years of struggle against Islam, and eager to assert its dominance as both a political and religious force. So great was the monarchs’ concern, that a spe- cial institution – the Holy Office of the Inquisition – was founded to root out the incidence of heresy within the crypto-Jewish community of Spain. At the same time, this unprecedented measure served to consolidate the Crown’s control over its disparate kingdoms via a common faith. The brutal persecu- tion of converso heresy, concentrated over the next five decades (c. 1480–1525), was set to continue – against all expectations – at intermittent intervals over the following three centuries. It set an indelible stamp of infamy on the his- tory and reputation of the Spanish Inquisition that became embodied in the Black Legend – a stereotypical image of Spain as a repressive, intolerant na- tion, propagated by its Protestant enemies, which modern historiography has largely reduced to a myth. In examining the historical record of the Inquisition we have to be mind- ful of its polemical status and the impact this has had on judgements of its past. This is particularly so in relation to its persecution of conversos which has arguably aroused most controversy. Until the mid-20th century opinion was colored more by the ideological and political persuasion of writers than by objective analysis. Juan Antonio Llorente (1756–1823), a former inquisitor- turned-liberal, who wrote the first critical history of the Inquisition from exile
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1 Juan Antonio Llorente, Historia crítica de la Inquisición Española, vol. 1 (Madrid: 1980 [1st ed.1870]), x. 2 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, vol. 1 (Madrid: 1880), 625–39. 3 William Hickling Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. 1 (London: 1837), 518–22. 4 Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. (London and New York: 1906–07). 5 For contemporary trends in inquisitorial historiography, see Francisco Bethencourt, The In- quisition. A Global History, 1478–1834 (Cambridge: 2009), 16–27.