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The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history.

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Following several backroom negotiations—which included industrialists, Hindenburg's son, the former chancellor Franz von Papen, and Hitler—Hindenburg acquiesced and on 30 January 1933, he formally appointed Adolf Hitler as Germany's new chancellor. Although he was chancellor, Hitler was not yet an absolute dictator.

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Treaty of Versailles 1919 Polish–Soviet War 1919 Treaty of Trianon 1920 Treaty of Rapallo 1920 Franco-Polish alliance 1921 March on Rome 1922 Corfu incident 1923 Occupation of the Ruhr 1923–1925

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The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war is commonly seen as having started on 6 April 1992, following a number of earlier violent incidents. The war ended on 14 December 1995.

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The apartheid system in South Africa was ended through a series of negotiations between 1990 and 1993 and through unilateral steps by the de Klerk government. These negotiations took place between the governing National Party, the African National Congress, and a wide variety of other political organisations.(google)

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On May 14 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day. (google)

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(May 1916), the secret convention made during world war I between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire  The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French and British-administered areas. Negotiations were begun in November 1915, and the final agreement took its name from the chief negotiators from Britain and France, sir mark of skeyes and François Georges-Picot.https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement

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Sykes-Picot Agreement, (May 1916), secret convention made during World War I between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. Negotiations were begun in November 1915, and the final agreement took its name from the chief negotiators from Britain and France, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sergey Dimitriyevich Sazonov was also present to represent Russia, the third member of the Triple Entente.

Background and provisions

In the midst of World War I the question arose of what would happen to the Ottoman territories if the war led to the disintegration of "the sick man of Europe." The Triple Entente moved to secure their respective interests in the region. They had agreed in the March 1915 Constantinople Agreement to give Russia Constantinople ( Istanbul) and areas around it, which would provide access to the Mediterranean Sea. France, meanwhile, had a number of economic investments and strategic relationships in Syria, especially in the area of Aleppo, while Britain wanted secure access to India through the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. It was out of a need to coordinate British and French interests in these regions that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was born.

Its provisions were as follows: (1) Russia should acquire the Armenian provinces of Erzurum, Trebizond ( Trabzon), Van, and Bitlis, with some Kurdish territory to the southeast; (2) France should acquire Lebanon and the Syrian littoral, Adana, Cilicia, and the hinterland adjacent to Russia's share, that hinterland including Aintab, Urfa, Mardin, Diyarbakır, and Mosul; (3) Great Britain should acquire southern Mesopotamia, including Baghdad, and also the Mediterranean ports of Haifa and ʿAkko (Acre); (4) between the French and the British acquisitions there should be a confederation of Arab states or a single independent Arab state, divided into French and British spheres of influence; (5) Alexandretta ( İskenderun) should be a free port; and (6) Palestine, because of the holy places, should be under an international regime.

Impact and legacy

The pact excited the ambitions of Italy, to whom it was communicated in August 1916, after the Italian declaration of war against Germany, with the result that it had to be supplemented, in April 1917, by the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, whereby Great Britain and France promised southern and southwestern Anatolia to Italy. The defection of Russia from the war canceled the Russian aspect of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Turkish Nationalists' victories after the military collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the gradual abandonment of any Italian projects for Anatolia.

The Arabs, however, who had learned of the Sykes-Picot Agreement through the publication of it, together with other secret treaties of imperial Russia, by the Soviet Russian government late in 1917, were scandalized by it. This secret arrangement conflicted in the first place with pledges already given by the British to the Hashemite dynast Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, sharif of Mecca, during the Ḥusayn-McMahon Correspondence (1915-16). Based on the understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive independence, Ḥusayn had brought the Arabs of the Hejaz into revolt against the Turks in June 1916.

Despite the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the British still appeared to support Arab self-determination at first, helping Ḥusayn's son Fayṣal and his forces press into Syria in 1918 and establish a government in Damascus. In April 1920, however, the Allied powers agreed to divide governance of the region into separate Class "A" mandates at the Conference of San Remo, along lines similar to those agreed upon under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The borders of these mandates split up Arab lands and ultimately led to the modern borders of Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

Even though the borders of the mandates were not determined until several years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the fact that the deal set the framework for these borders stoked lingering resentment well into the 21st century. Pan-Arabists opposed splitting up the mostly Arab-populated territories into separate countries, which they considered to be little more than imperialist impositions. Moreover, the borders split up other contiguous populations, like the Kurds and the Druze, and left them as minority populations in several countries, depriving their communities of self-determination altogether. Moments of political turmoil were often met with declarations of "the end of Sykes-Picot," such as the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq in 1992 or the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in 2014. Meanwhile, the Sykes-Picot Agreement is often criticized together with the Ḥusayn-McMahon Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration as contradictory promises made by Britain to France, the Arabs, and the Zionist movement.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Pat Bauer.

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Sykes-Picot Agreement | Map, History, & Facts

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Sykes-Picot Agreement, secret deal between the Triple Entente in 1916 for the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Though it did not itself determine the modern borders of the Middle East, it laid the groundwork for later agreements which did and has thus left a disreputable legacy among the population of the Middle East.

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Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century. Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad's life. ( google )

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The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition - 1478 established by the Catholic Monarchs.  It was intended to maintain catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition which was under papal control.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

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The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition ( Spanish: Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición), commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition ( Inquisición española), was established in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. 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 the 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 America 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, approximately 2.7 percent of all cases. The Inquisition, however, since the creation of the American courts, has never had jurisdiction over the Indians. The King of Spain ordered "that the inquisitors should never proceed against the Indians, but against the old Christians and their descendants and other persons against whom in these kingdoms of Spain it is customary to proceed".

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 following 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 and , 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.

The Virgin of the Catholic Monarchs.

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. 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 Catholic citizens. 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 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.

There are several hypotheses of what prompted the creation of the tribunal after centuries of tolerance (within the context of medieval Europe).

The Spanish Inquisition is interpretable as a response to the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors. The Reconquista did not result in the total expulsion of Muslims from Spain, since they, along with Jews, were tolerated by the ruling Christian elite. Large cities, especially Seville, Valladolid, and Barcelona, had significant Jewish populations centered on Juderia, but in the coming years the Muslims became increasingly alienated and relegated from power centers.

Post-reconquest medieval Spain has been characterized by Américo Castro as a society of relatively peaceful co-existence ( convivencia) punctuated by occasional conflict among the ruling Catholics and the Jews and Muslims. As historian Henry Kamen notes, the "so-called convivencia was always a relationship between unequals." Despite their legal inequality, there was a long tradition of Jewish service to the Crown of Aragon, and Jews occupied many important posts, both religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi. Ferdinand's father John II named the Jewish Abiathar Crescas Court Astronomer.

Anti-semitic attitudes increased all over Europe during the late 13th century and throughout the 14th century. England and France expelled their Jewish populations in 1290 and 1306 respectively. At the same time, during the Reconquista, Spain's anti-Jewish sentiment steadily increased. This prejudice climaxed in the summer of 1391 when violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in Spanish cities like Barcelona. To linguistically distinguish them from non-converted or long-established Catholic families, new converts were called conversos, or New Catholics. This event must be understood in the context of the fierce civil war and new politics that Peter the Cruel had brought to the land, and not be confused with spontaneous anti-semitic reactions to the plague seen in northern Europe.

According to Don Hasdai Crescas, persecution against Jews began in earnest in Seville in 1391, on the 1st day of the lunar month Tammuz (June). From there the violence spread to Córdoba, and by the 17th day of the same lunar month, it had reached Toledo (called then by Jews after its Arabic name "Ṭulayṭulah") in the region of Castile. Then the violence spread to Mallorca and by the 1st day of the lunar month Elul it had also reached the Jews of Barcelona in Catalonia, where the slain were estimated at two-hundred and fifty. Indeed, many Jews who resided in the neighboring provinces of Lleida and Gironda and in the kingdom of Valencia had also been affected, as were also the Jews of Al-Andalus (Andalucía). While many died a martyr's death, others converted to save themselves.

Encouraged by the preaching of Ferrand Martínez, Archdeacon of Ecija, the general unrest affected nearly all of the Jews in Spain, during which time an estimated 200,000 Jews changed their religion or else concealed their religion, becoming known in Hebrew as Anusim, meaning, "those who are compelled [to hide their religion]." Only a handful of the more principal persons of the Jewish community, those who had found refuge among the viceroys in the outlying towns and districts, managed to escape.

Forced baptism was contrary to the law of the Catholic Church, and theoretically anybody who had been forcibly baptized could legally return to Judaism. Legal definitions of the time theoretically acknowledged that a forced baptism was not a valid sacrament, but confined this to cases where it was literally administered by physical force: a person who had consented to baptism under threat of death or serious injury was still regarded as a voluntary convert, and accordingly forbidden to revert to Judaism. After the public violence, many of the converted "felt it safer to remain in their new religion." Thus, after 1391, a new social group appeared and were referred to as or New Christians. Many conversos, now freed from the anti-Semitic restrictions imposed on Jewish employment, attained important positions in fifteenth-century Spain, including positions in the government and in the Church. Among many others, physicians Andrés Laguna and Francisco López de Villalobos (Ferdinand's court physician), writers Juan del Enzina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia, and bankers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez (who financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus) were all conversos. Conversos -not without opposition-managed to attain high positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, at times becoming severe detractors of Judaism. Some even received titles of nobility and, as a result, during the following century some works attempted to demonstrate many nobles of Spain were descended from Israelites.

According to this hypothesis, the Inquisition was created to standardize the variety of laws and many jurisdictions Spain was divided into. It would be an administrative program analogous to the Santa Hermandad (the "Holy Brotherhood", a law enforcement body, answering to the crown, that prosecuted thieves and criminals across counties in a way local county authorities could not, ancestor to the Guardia Civil), an institution that would guarantee uniform prosecution of crimes against royal laws across all local jurisdictions.

The Kingdom of Castile had been prosperous and successful in Europe thanks in part to the unusual authority and control the king exerted over the nobility, which ensured political stability and kept the kingdom from being weakened by in-fighting (as was the case in England, for example). Under the Trastámara dynasty, both kings of Castile and Aragon had lost power to the great nobles, who now formed dissenting and conspiratorial factions. Taxation and varying privileges differed from county to county, and powerful noble families constantly extorted the kings to attain further concessions, particularly in Aragon.

The main goals of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs were to unite their two kingdoms and strengthen royal influence to guarantee stability. In pursuit of this, they sought to further unify the laws of their realms and reduce the power of the nobility in certain local areas. They attained this partially by raw military strength by creating a combined army between the two of them that could outmatch the army of most noble coalitions in the Peninsula. It was impossible to change the entire laws of both realms by force alone, and due to reasonable suspicion of one another the monarchs kept their kingdoms separate during their lifetimes. The only way to unify both kingdoms and ensure that Isabella, Ferdinand, and their descendants maintained the power of both kingdoms without uniting them in life was to find, or create, an executive, legislative and judicial arm directly under the Crown empowered to act in both kingdoms. This goal, the hypothesis goes, might have given birth to the Spanish Inquisition.

The religious organization to oversee this role was obvious: Catholicism was the only institution common to both kingdoms, and the only one with enough popular support that the nobility could not easily attack it. Through the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and Ferdinand created a personal police force and personal code of law that rested above the structure of their respective realms without altering or mixing them, and could operate freely in both. As the Inquisition had the backing of both kingdoms, it would exist independent of both the nobility and local interests of either kingdom.

According to this view, the prosecution of heretics would be secondary, or simply not considered different, from the prosecution of conspirators, traitors, or groups of any kind who planned to resist royal authority. At the time, royal authority rested on divine right and on oaths of loyalty held before God, so the connection between religious deviation and political disloyalty would appear obvious. This hypothesis is supported by the disproportionately high representation of the nobility and high clergy among those investigated by the Inquisition, as well as by the many administrative and civil crimes the Inquisition oversaw. The Inquisition prosecuted the counterfeiting of royal seals and currency, ensured the effective transmission of the orders of the kings, and verified the authenticity of official documents traveling through the kingdoms, especially from one kingdom to the other. See "Non-Religious Crimes".

At a time when most of Europe had already expelled the Jews from the Christian kingdoms, the "dirty blood" of Spaniards was met with open suspicion and contempt by the rest of Europe. As the world became smaller and foreign relations became more relevant to stay in power, this foreign image of "being the seed of Jews and Moors" may have become a problem. In addition, the coup that allowed Isabella to take the throne from Joana of Avis and the Catholic Monarchs to marry had estranged Castile from Portugal, its historical ally, and created the need for new relationships. Similarly, Aragon's ambitions lay in control of the Mediterranean and the defense against France. As their policy of royal marriages proved, the Catholic Monarchs were deeply concerned about France's growing power and expected to create strong dynastic alliances across Europe. In this scenario, the Iberian reputation of being too tolerant was a problem.

Despite the prestige earned through the reconquest ( reconquista), the foreign image of Spaniards coexisted with an almost universal image of heretics and "bad Christians", due to the long coexistence between the three religions they had accepted in their lands. Anti-Jewish stereotypes created to justify or prompt the expulsion and expropriation of the European Jews were also applied to Spaniards in most European courts, and the idea of them being "greedy, gold-thirsty, cruel and violent" due to the "Jewish and Moorish blood" was prevalent in Europe before America was discovered by Europeans. Chronicles by foreign travelers circulated through Europe, describing the tolerant ambiance reigning in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand, and how Moors and Jews were free to go about without anyone trying to convert them. Past and common clashes between the Pope and the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula regarding the Inquisition in Castile's case and regarding South Italy in Aragon's case, also reinforced their image of heretics in the international courts. These accusations and images could have direct political and military consequences at the time, especially considering that the union of two powerful kingdoms was a particularly delicate moment that could prompt the fear and violent reactions from neighbors, even more if combined with the expansion of the Ottoman Turks on the Mediterranean.

The creation of the Inquisition and the expulsion of both Jews and Moriscos may have been part of a strategy to whitewash the image of Spain and ease international fears regarding Spain's allegiance. In this scenario, the creation of the Inquisition could have been part of the Catholic Monarchs' strategy to " turn" away from African allies and "towards" Europe, a tool to turn both actual Spain and the Spanish image more European and improve relations with the Pope.

The alleged discovery of Morisco plots to support a possible Ottoman invasion were crucial factors in their decision to create the Inquisition. At this time, the Ottoman Empire was in rapid expansion and the Aragonese Mediterranean Empire was crumbling under debt and war exhaustion. Ferdinand reasonably feared that he would not be capable of repelling an Ottoman attack to Spain's shores, especially if the Ottomans had internal help. The regions with the highest concentration of Moriscos were those close to the common naval crossings between Spain and Africa. If the weakness of the Aragonese Naval Empire was combined with the resentment of the higher nobility against the monarchs, the dynastic claims of Portugal on Castile and the two monarchs' exterior politics that turned away from Morocco and other African nations in favor of Europe, the fear of a second Muslim invasion, and thus a second Muslim occupation was hardly unfounded. This fear may have been the base reason for the expulsion of those citizens who had either a religious reason to support the invasion of the Ottomans (Moriscos) or no particular religious reason to not do it (Jews). The Inquisition might have been part of the preparations to enforce these measures and ensure their effectiveness by rooting out false converts that would still pose a threat of foreign espionage.

In favor of this view there is the obvious military sense it makes, and the many early attempts of peaceful conversion and persuasion that the Monarchs used at the beginning of their reign, and the sudden turn towards the creation of the Inquisition and the edicts of expulsion when those initial attempts failed. The conquest of Naples by the Gran Capitan is also proof of an interest in Mediterranean expansion and re-establishment of Spanish power in that sea that was bound to generate frictions with the Ottoman Empire and other African nations. So, the Inquisition would have been created as a permanent body to prevent the existence of citizens with religious sympathies with African nations now that rivalry with them had been deemed unavoidable.

The creation of the Spanish Inquisition was consistent with the most important political philosophers of the Florentine School, with whom the kings were known to have contact ( Guicciardini, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Segni, Pitti, Nardi, Varchi, etc.) Both Guicciardini and Machiavelli defended the importance of centralization and unification to create a strong state capable of repelling foreign invasions, and also warned of the dangers of excessive social uniformity to the creativity and innovation of a nation. Machiavelli considered piety and morals desirable for the subjects but not so much for the ruler, who should use them as a way to unify its population. He also warned of the nefarious influence of a corrupt church in the creation of a selfish population and middle nobility, which had fragmented the peninsula and made it unable to resist either France or Aragon. German philosophers at the time were spreading the importance of a vassal sharing the religion of their lord.

The Inquisition may have just been the result of putting these ideas into practice. The use of religion as a unifying factor across a land that was allowed to stay diverse and maintain different laws in other respects, and the creation of the Inquisition to enforce laws across it, maintain said religious unity and control the local elites were consistent with most of those teachings.

Alternatively, the enforcement of Catholicism across the realm might indeed be the result of simple religious devotion by the monarchs. The recent scholarship on the expulsion of the Jews leans towards the belief of religious motivations being at the bottom of it. But considering the reports on Ferdinand's political persona, that is unlikely the only reason. Ferdinand was described, among others, by Machiavelli, as a man who didn't know the meaning of piety, but who made political use of it and would have achieved little if he had really known it. He was Machiavelli's main inspiration while writing The Prince.

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church had made many attempts during the Middle Ages to take over Christian Spain politically, such as claiming the Church's ownership over all land reconquered from non-Christians (a claim that was rejected by Castile but accepted by Aragon and Portugal). In the past, the papacy had tried and partially succeeded, in forcing the Mozarabic Rite out of Iberia. Its intervention had been pivotal for Aragon's loss of Rosellon. The meddling regarding Aragon's control over South Italy was even stronger historically. In their lifetime, the Catholic Monarchs had problems with Pope Paul II, a very strong proponent of absolute authority for the church over the kings. Carrillo actively opposed them both and often used Spain's "mixed blood" as an excuse to intervene. The papacy and the monarchs of Europe had been involved in a rivalry for power all through the high Middle Ages that Rome had already won in other powerful kingdoms like France.

Since the legitimacy granted by the church was necessary for both monarchs, especially Isabella, to stay in power, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition may have been a way to apparently concede to the Pope's demands and criticism regarding Spain's mixed religious heritage, while at the same time ensuring that the Pope could hardly force the second inquisition of his own, and at the same time create a tool to control the power of the Roman Church in Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was unique at the time because it was not led by the Pope. Once the bull of creation was granted, the head of the Inquisition was the Monarch of Spain. It was in charge of enforcing the laws of the king regarding religion and other private-life matters, not of following orders from Rome, from which it was independent. This independence allowed the Inquisition to investigate, prosecute and convict clergy for both corruptions and possible charges of treason of conspiracy against the crown (on the Pope's behalf presumably) without the Pope's intervention. The inquisition was, despite its title of "Holy", not necessarily formed by the clergy and secular lawyers were equally welcome to it. If it was an attempt at keeping Rome out of Spain, it was an extremely successful and refined one. It was a bureaucratic body that had the nominal authority of the church and permission to prosecute members of the church, which the kings could not do, while answering only to the Spanish Crown. This did not prevent the Pope from having some influence on the decisions of Spanish monarchs, but it did force the influence to be through the kings, making direct influence very difficult.

Other hypotheses that circulate regarding the Spanish Inquisition's creation include:

Economic reasons: Since one of the penalties that the Inquisition could enforce on the convicts was the confiscation of their property, which became Crown property, it has been stated that the creation of the Inquisition was a way to finance the crown. There is no solid reason for this hypothesis to stand alone, nor for the Kings of Spain to need an institution to do this gradually instead of confiscating property through edicts, but it may be one of the reasons why the Inquisition stayed for so long. This hypothesis notes the tendency of the Inquisition to operate in large and wealthy cities and is favoured by those who consider that most of those prosecuted for practising Judaism and Islam in secret were actually innocent of it.[27] Gustav Bergenroth, editor and translator of the Spanish state papers from 1485-1509, believed that revenue was the incentive for Ferdinand and Isabella's decision to invite the Inquisition into Spain.[28] Other authors point out that both monarchs were very aware of the economic consequences they would suffer from a decrease in population.

Intolerance and racism: This argument is usually made regarding the expulsion of the Jews or the Moriscos,[27] and since the Inquisition was so closely interconnected with those actions can be expanded to it. It varies between those who deny that Spain was really that different from the rest of Europe regarding tolerance and openmindedness and those who argue that it used to be, but gradually the antisemitic and racist atmosphere of medieval Europe rubbed onto it. It explains the creation of the Inquisition as the result of exactly the same forces as those that caused the creation of similar entities across Europe. This view may account for the similarities between the Spanish Inquisition and similar institutions but completely fails to account for its many unique characteristics, including its time of appearance and its duration through time, so even if accepted requires the addition of some of the other hypothesis to be complete.[17]

Purely religious reasons: essentially this view suggests that the Catholic Monarchs created the Inquisition to prosecute heretics and sodomites "because the Bible says so".

Tomás de Torquemada

Fray Alonso de Ojeda, a Dominican friar from Seville, convinced Queen Isabella of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478. A report, produced by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada -of converso family himself-corroborated this assertion.

Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella requested a papal bull establishing an inquisition in Spain in 1478. Pope Sixtus IV granted a bull permitting the monarchs to select and appoint two or three priests over forty years of age to act as inquisitors. In 1483, Ferdinand and Isabella established a state council to administer the inquisition with the Dominican Friar Tomás de Torquemada acting as its president, even though Sixtus IV protested the activities of the inquisition in Aragon and its treatment of the conversos. Torquemada eventually assumed the title of Inquisitor-General.

Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured Pope Sixtus IV to agree to an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome. The pope issued a bull to stop the Inquisition but was pressured into withdrawing it. On 1 November 1478, Sixtus published the Papal bull, Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which he gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors in their kingdoms. The first two inquisitors, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín, were not named until two years later, on 27 September 1480 in Medina del Campo.

The first was held in Seville on 6 February 1481: six people were burned alive. From there, the Inquisition grew rapidly in the Kingdom of Castile. By 1492, tribunals existed in eight Castilian cities: Ávila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo, and Valladolid. Sixtus IV promulgated a new bull categorically prohibiting the Inquisition's extension to Aragón, affirming that:

... many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other low people-and still less appropriate-without tests of any kind, have been locked up in secular prisons, tortured, and condemned like relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and given over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.

-  Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision

According to the book A History of the Jewish People,

In 1482 the pope was still trying to maintain control over the Inquisition and to gain acceptance for his own attitude towards the New Christians which was generally more moderate than that of the Inquisition and the local rulers.

In 1483, Jews were expelled from all of Andalusia. Though the pope wanted to crack down on abuses, Ferdinand pressured him to promulgate a new bull, threatening that he would otherwise separate the Inquisition from Church authority. Sixtus did so on 17 October 1483, naming Tomás de Torquemada Inquisidor General of Aragón, Valencia, and Catalonia.

Torquemada quickly established procedures for the Inquisition. A new court would be announced with a thirty-day grace period for confessions and the gathering of accusations by neighbors. Evidence that was used to identify a crypto-Jew included the absence of chimney smoke on Saturdays (a sign the family might secretly be honoring the Sabbath), the buying of many vegetables before Passover, or the purchase of meat from a converted butcher. The court could employ physical torture to extract confessions once the guilt of the accused had been established. Crypto-Jews were allowed to confess and do penance, although those who relapsed were executed.

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII attempted to allow appeals to Rome against the Inquisition, which would weaken the function of the institution as protection against the pope, but Ferdinand in December 1484 and again in 1509 decreed death and confiscation for anyone trying to make use of such procedures without royal permission. With this, the Inquisition became the only institution that held authority across all the realms of the Spanish monarchy and, in all of them, a useful mechanism at the service of the crown. The cities of Aragón continued resisting, and even saw revolt, as in Teruel from 1484 to 1485. The murder of Inquisidor Pedro Arbués in Zaragoza on 15 September 1485, caused public opinion to turn against the conversos and in favour of the Inquisition. In Aragón, the Inquisitorial courts were focused specifically on members of the powerful converso minority, ending their influence in the Aragonese administration.

The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530. Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and executions in this period; some estimate about 2,000 executions, based on the documentation of the autos-da-fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin. He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin.

The Inquisition had jurisdiction only over Christians. It had no power to investigate, prosecute, or convict Jews, Muslims, or any open member of other religions. Anyone who was known to identify as either Jew or Muslim was outside of Inquisitorial jurisdiction and could be tried only by the King. All the inquisition could do in some of those cases was to deport the individual according to the King's law, but usually, even that had to go through a civil tribunal. The Inquisition had the authority to try only those who self-identified as Christians (initially for taxation purposes, later to avoid deportation as well) while practicing another religion de facto. Even those were treated as Christians. If they confessed or identified not as "judeizantes" but as fully practicing Jews, they fell back into the previously explained category and could not be targeted, although they would have pleaded guilty to previously lying about being Christian.

Expulsion of Jews and Jewish conversos

Though not subject to the Inquisition, Jews who refused to convert or leave Spain were called heretics and could be burned to death on a stake

The Spanish Inquisition had been established in part to prevent conversos from engaging in Jewish practices, which, as Christians, they were supposed to have given up. This remedy for securing the orthodoxy of conversos was eventually deemed inadequate since the main justification the monarchy gave for formally expelling all Jews from Spain was the "great harm suffered by Christians (i.e., conversos) from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with the Jews, who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith", according to the 1492 edict.

The Alhambra Decree, issued in January 1492, gave the choice between expulsion and conversion. It was among the few expulsion orders that allowed conversion as an alternative and is used as a proof of the religious, not racial, element of the measure. The enforcement of this decree was very unequal with the focus mainly on coastal and southern regions-those at risk of Ottoman invasion-and more gradual and ineffective enforcement towards the interior.

Historic accounts of the numbers of Jews who left Spain were based on speculation, and some aspects were exaggerated by early accounts and historians: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Don Isaac Abravanel of 300,000. While few reliable statistics exist for the expulsion, modern estimates based on tax returns and population estimates of communities are much lower, with Kamen stating that of a population of approximately 80,000 Jews and 200,000 conversos, about 40,000 emigrated. The Jews of the kingdom of Castile emigrated mainly to Portugal (where the entire community was forcibly converted in 1497) and to North Africa. The Jews of the kingdom of Aragon fled to other Christian areas including Italy, rather than to Muslim lands as is often assumed. Although the vast majority of conversos simply assimilated into the Catholic dominant culture, a minority continued to practice Judaism in secret, gradually migrated throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, mainly to areas where Sephardic communities were already present as a result of the Alhambra Decree.

The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560 the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped to 3% of the total. There was a rebound of persecutions when a group of crypto-Jews was discovered in Quintanar de la Orden in 1588 and there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition, founded in 1536. This led to a rapid increase in the trials of crypto-Jews, among them a number of important financiers. In 1691, during a number of in Majorca, 37 chuetas, or conversos of Majorca, were burned.

During the eighteenth century, the number of conversos accused by the Inquisition decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Córdoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.

Expulsion of Moriscos and Morisco conversos

The Inquisition searched for false or relapsed converts among the Moriscos, who had converted from Islam. Beginning with a decree on 14 February 1502, Muslims in Granada had to choose between conversion to Christianity or expulsion. In the Crown of Aragon, most Muslims faced this choice after the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (1519-1523). It is important to note that the enforcement of the expulsion of the moriscos was done really unevenly, especially in the lands of the interior and the north, where the coexistence had lasted for over five centuries and moriscos were protected by the population, and orders were partially or completely ignored.

The War of the Alpujarras (1568-71), a general Muslim/Morisco uprising in Granada that expected to aid Ottoman disembarkation in the peninsula, ended in a forced dispersal of about half of the region's Moriscos throughout Castile and Andalusia as well as increased suspicions by Spanish authorities against this community.

Many Moriscos were suspected of practising Islam in secret, and the jealousy with which they guarded the privacy of their domestic life prevented the verification of this suspicion. Initially, they were not severely persecuted by the Inquisition, experiencing instead a policy of evangelization a policy not followed with those conversos who were suspected of being crypto-Jews. There were various reasons for this. In the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon, a large number of the Moriscos were under the jurisdiction of the nobility, and persecution would have been viewed as a frontal assault on the economic interests of this powerful social class. Most importantly, the moriscos had integrated into the Spanish society significantly better than the Jews, intermarrying with the population often, and were not seen as a foreign element, especially in rural areas. Still, fears ran high among the population that the Moriscos were traitorous, especially in Granada. The coast was regularly raided by Barbary pirates backed by Spain's enemy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Moriscos were suspected of aiding them.

In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, conditions worsened between Old Christians and Moriscos. The Morisco Revolt in Granada in 1568-1570 was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition intensified its attention on the Moriscos. From 1570 Morisco cases became predominant in the tribunals of Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada; in the tribunal of Granada, between 1560 and 1571, 82% of those accused were Moriscos, who were a vast majority of the Kingdom's population at the time. Still, the Moriscos did not experience the same harshness as judaizing conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.

In 1609, King Philip III, upon the advice of his financial adviser the Duke of Lerma and Archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera, decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos. Hundreds of thousands of Moriscos were expelled. This was further fueled by the religious intolerance of Archbishop Ribera who quoted the Old Testament texts ordering the enemies of God to be slain without mercy and setting forth the duties of kings to extirpate them. The edict required: 'The Moriscos to depart, under the pain of death and confiscation, without trial or sentence... to take with them no money, bullion, jewels or bills of exchange.... just what they could carry.' Although initial estimates of the number expelled such as those of Henri Lapeyre reach 300,000 Moriscos (or 4% of the total Spanish population), the extent and severity of the expulsion in much of Spain has been increasingly challenged by modern historians such as Trevor J. Dadson. Nevertheless, the eastern region of Valencia, where ethnic tensions were high, was particularly affected by the expulsion, suffering economic collapse and depopulation of much of its territory.

Of those permanently expelled, the majority finally settled in the Maghreb or the Barbary coast. Those who avoided expulsion or who managed to return were gradually absorbed by the dominant culture.

The Inquisition pursued some trials against Moriscos who remained or returned after expulsion: at the height of the Inquisition, cases against Moriscos are estimated to have constituted less than 10 percent of those judged by the Inquisition. Upon the coronation of Philip IV in 1621, the new king gave the order to desist from attempting to impose measures on remaining Moriscos and returnees. In September 1628 the Council of the Supreme Inquisition ordered inquisitors in Seville not to prosecute expelled Moriscos "unless they cause significant commotion." The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving relatively light sentences. By the end of the 18th century, the indigenous practice of Islam is considered to have been effectively extinguished in Spain.

Despite popular myths about the Spanish Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain. Lutheran was a portmanteau accusation used by the Inquisition to act against all those who acted in a way that was offensive to the church. The first of the trials against those labeled by the Inquisition as "Lutheran" were those against the sect of mystics known as the " Alumbrados" of Guadalajara and Valladolid. The trials were long and ended with prison sentences of differing lengths, though none of the sect were executed. Nevertheless, the subject of the "Alumbrados" put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals and clerics who, interested in Erasmian ideas, had strayed from orthodoxy. This is striking because both Charles I and Philip II were confessed admirers of Erasmus. The first trials against Lutheran groups, as such, took place between 1558 and 1562, at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, against two communities of Protestants from the cities of Valladolid and Seville, numbering about 120. The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition's activities. A number of were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family, and around 100 executions took place. The autos-da-fé of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism, which was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with.

After 1562, though the trials continued, the repression was much reduced. About 200 Spaniards were accused of being Protestants in the last decades of the 16th century.

Most of them were in no sense Protestants ... Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as "Lutheran." Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy...

It is estimated that a dozen Spaniards were burned alive.

Protestantism was treated as a marker to identify agents of foreign powers and symptoms of political disloyalty as much as, if not more than a cause of prosecution in itself.

Even though the Inquisition had theoretical permission to investigate Orthodox "heretics", it almost never did. There was no major war between Spain and any Orthodox nation, so there was no reason to do so. There was one casualty tortured by those "Jesuits" (though most likely, Franciscans) who administered the Spanish Inquisition in North America, according to authorities within the Eastern Orthodox Church: St. Peter the Aleut. Even that single report has various numbers of inaccuracies that make it problematic, and has no confirmation in the Inquisitorial archives.

The category "superstitions" includes trials related to witchcraft. The witch-hunt in Spain had much less intensity than in other European countries (particularly France, Scotland, and Germany). One remarkable case was that of Logroño, in which the witches of Zugarramurdi in Navarre were persecuted. During the that took place in Logroño on 7 and 8 November 1610, six people were burned and another five burned in effigy. The role of the Inquisition in cases of witchcraft was much more restricted than is commonly believed. Well after the foundation of the Inquisition, jurisdiction over sorcery and witchcraft remained in secular hands. In general the Inquisition maintained a skeptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it as a mere superstition without any basis. Alonso de Salazar Frías, who took the Edict of Faith to various parts of Navarre after the trials of Logroño, noted in his report to the Suprema that, "There were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked and written about".

Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal offences, from outright blasphemy to questionable statements regarding religious beliefs, from issues of sexual morality to misbehaviour of the clergy. Many were brought to trial for affirming that simple fornication (sex between unmarried persons) was not a sin or for putting in doubt different aspects of Christian faith such as Transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary. Also, members of the clergy themselves were occasionally accused of heretical propositions. These offences rarely led to severe penalties.

Pope Clement VII granted the Inquisition jurisdiction over sodomy within Aragon in 1524, in response to a petition from the Saragossa tribunal. The Inquisition in Castile declined to take the same jurisdiction, making sodomy the only major crime with such a significant regional discrepancy. Even within Aragon, the treatment of sodomy varied significantly by region, because the pope's decree required that it be prosecuted according to each area's local law. For instance, the tribunal of the city of Zaragoza was considered unusually harsh by contemporaries.

The first person known to have been executed by the Inquisition for sodomy was a priest, Salvador Vidal, in 1541. Others convicted of sodomy received sentences including fines, burning in effigy, public whipping, and the galleys. The first burning for sodomy took place in Valencia in 1572.

Sodomy was an expansive term; while a 1560 decision ruled that lesbian sex not involving a dildo could not be prosecuted as sodomy, bestiality routinely was, especially in Saragossa in the 1570s. Men might also be prosecuted based on accusations of engaging in heterosexual sodomy with their wives.

Those accused included 19% clergy, 6% nobles, 37% workers, 19% servants, and 18% soldiers and sailors. Nearly all of almost 500 cases of sodomy between persons concerned the relationship between an older man and an adolescent, often by coercion, with only a few cases where the couple were consenting homosexual adults. About 100 of the total involved allegations of child abuse. Adolescents were generally punished more leniently than adults, but only when they were very young (under about 12 years) or when the case clearly concerned rape did they have a chance to avoid punishment altogether.

Prosecutions for sodomy gradually declined, in large part due to decisions from the Suprema intended to reduce the publicity for sodomy cases. In 1579, public autos-da-fé ceased to include people convicted on sodomy charges unless they were sentenced to death; even the death sentences were excluded from public proclamation after 1610. In 1589, Aragon raised the minimum age for sodomy executions to 25, and by 1633 executions for sodomy had generally come to an end.

The Roman Catholic Church has regarded Freemasonry as heretical since about 1738; the suspicion of Freemasonry was potentially a capital offence. Spanish Inquisition records reveal two prosecutions in Spain and only a few more throughout the Spanish Empire. In 1815, Francisco Javier de Mier y Campillo, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition and the Bishop of Almería, suppressed Freemasonry and denounced the lodges as "societies which lead to atheism, to sedition and to all errors and crimes." He then instituted a purge during which Spaniards could be arrested on the charge of being "suspected of Freemasonry".

As one manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition worked actively to impede the diffusion of heretical ideas in Spain by producing "Indexes" of prohibited books. Such lists of prohibited books were common in Europe a decade before the Inquisition published its first. The first Index published in Spain in 1551 was, in reality, a reprinting of the Index published by the University of Leuven in 1550, with an appendix dedicated to Spanish texts. Subsequent Indexes were published in 1559, 1583, 1612, 1632, and 1640.

Included in the Indices, at one point, were some of the great works of Spanish literature, but most of the works were religious in nature and plays. A number of religious writers who are today considered saints by the Catholic Church saw their works appear in the Indexes. At first, this might seem counter-intuitive or even nonsensical-how were these Spanish authors published in the first place if their texts were then prohibited by the Inquisition and placed in the Index? The answer lies in the process of publication and censorship in Early Modern Spain. Books in Early Modern Spain faced prepublication licensing and approval (which could include modification) by both secular and religious authorities. Once approved and published, the circulating text also faced the possibility of post-hoc censorship by being denounced to the Inquisition-sometimes decades later. Likewise, as Catholic theology evolved, once-prohibited texts might be removed from the Index.

At first, inclusion in the Index meant total prohibition of a text. This proved not only impractical and unworkable but also contrary to the goals of having a literate and well-educated clergy. In time, a compromise solution was adopted in which trusted Inquisition officials blotted out words, lines or whole passages of otherwise acceptable texts, thus allowing these expurgated editions to circulate. Although in theory, the Indexes imposed enormous restrictions on the diffusion of culture in Spain, some historians argue that such strict control was impossible in practice and that there was much more liberty in this respect than is often believed. And Irving Leonard has conclusively demonstrated that, despite repeated royal prohibitions, romances of chivalry, such as Amadis of Gaul, found their way to the New World with the blessing of the Inquisition. Moreover, with the coming of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, increasing numbers of licenses to possess and read prohibited texts were granted.

Despite the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the development of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro", although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another. Among the Spanish authors included in the Index are Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Enzina, Jorge de Montemayor, Juan de Valdés and Lope de Vega, as well as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and the Cancionero General by Hernando del Castillo. La Celestina, which was not included in the Indexes of the 16th century, was expurgated in 1632 and prohibited in its entirety in 1790. Among the non-Spanish authors prohibited were Ovid, Dante, Rabelais, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Jean Bodin, Valentine Naibod and Thomas More (known in Spain as Tomás Moro). One of the most outstanding and best-known cases in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is that of Fray Luis de León, noted humanist and religious writer of converso origin, who was imprisoned for four years (from 1572 to 1576) for having translated the Song of Songs directly from Hebrew.

Some scholars state that one of the main effects of the inquisition was to end free thought and scientific thought in Spain. As one contemporary Spaniard in exile put it: "Our country is a land of pride and envy ... barbarism; down there one cannot produce any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence was imposed on the learned." For the next few centuries, while the rest of Europe was slowly awakened by the influence of the Enlightenment, Spain stagnated. This conclusion is contested.

The censorship of books was actually very ineffective, and prohibited books circulated in Spain without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom than in other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries. The apparent paradox gets explained by both the hermeticist religious ideas of the Spanish church and monarchy, and the budding seed of what would become Enlightened absolutism taking shape in Spain. The list of banned books was not, as interpreted sometimes, a list of evil books but a list of books that lay people were very likely to misinterpret. The presence of highly symbolical and high-quality literature on the list was so explained. These metaphorical or parable sounding books were listed as not meant for free circulation, but there might be no objections to the book itself and the circulation among scholars was mostly free. Most of these books were carefully collected by the elite. The practical totality of the prohibited books can be found now as then in the library of the monasterio del Escorial, carefully collected by Philip II and Philip III. The collection was "public" after Philip II's death and members of universities, intellectuals, courtesans, clergy, and certain branches of the nobility didn't have too many problems to access them and commission authorised copies. The Inquisition has not been known to make any serious attempt to stop this for all the books, but there are some records of them "suggesting" the King of Spain to stop collecting grimoires or magic-related ones.

The Inquisition also pursued offenses against morals and general social order, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular, there were trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offence in a society that only permitted divorce under the most extreme circumstances. In the case of men, the penalty was two hundred lashes and five to ten years of "service to the Crown". Said service could be whatever the court deemed most beneficial for the nation but it usually was either five years as an oarsman in a royal galley for those without any qualification (possibly a death sentence), or ten years working maintained but without salary in a public Hospital or charitable institution of the sort for those with some special skill, such as doctors, surgeons, or lawyers. The penalty was five to seven years as an oarsman in the case of Portugal.

Under the category of "unnatural marriage" fell any marriage or attempted marriage between two individuals who could not procreate. The Catholic Church in general, and in particular a nation constantly at war like Spain, emphasised the reproductive goal of marriage.

The Spanish Inquisition's policy in this regard was restrictive but applied in a very egalitarian way. It considered unnatural any non-reproductive marriage, and natural any reproductive one, regardless of gender or sex involved. The two forms of obvious male sterility were either due to damage to the genitals through castration, or accidental wounding at war (capón), or to some genetic condition that might keep the man from completing puberty (lampiño). Female sterility was also a reason to declare a marriage unnatural but was harder to prove. One case that dealt with marriage, sex, and gender was the trial of Eleno de Céspedes.

Despite popular belief, the role of the Inquisition as a mainly religious institution, or religious in nature at all, is contested at best. Its main function was that of private police for the Crown with jurisdiction to enforce the law in those crimes that took place in the private sphere of life. The notion of religion and civil law being separate is a modern construction and made no sense in the 15th century, so there was no difference between breaking a law regarding religion and breaking a law regarding tax collection. The difference between them is a modern projection the institution itself did not have. As such, the Inquisition was the prosecutor (in some cases the only prosecutor) of any crimes that could be perpetrated without the public taking notice (mainly domestic crimes, crimes against the weakest members of society, administrative crimes and forgeries, organized crime, and crimes against the Crown).

Examples include crimes associated with sexual or family relations such as rape and sexual violence (the Inquisition was the first and only body who punished it across the nation), bestiality, pedophilia (often overlapping with sodomy), incest, child abuse or neglect and (as discussed) bigamy. Non-religious crimes also included procurement (not prostitution), human trafficking, smuggling, forgery or falsification of currency, documents or signatures, tax fraud (many religious crimes were considered subdivisions of this one), illegal weapons, swindles, disrespect to the Crown or its institutions (the Inquisition included, but also the church, the guard, and the kings themselves), espionage for a foreign power, conspiracy, treason.

The non-religious crimes processed by the Inquisition accounted for a considerable percentage of its total investigations and are often hard to separate in the statistics, even when documentation is available. The line between religious and non-religious crimes did not exist in 15th century Spain as legal concept. Many of the crimes listed here and some of the religious crimes listed in previous sections were contemplated under the same article. For example, "sodomy" included paedophilia as a subtype. Often part of the data given for prosecution of male homosexuality corresponds to convictions for paedophilia, not adult homosexuality. In other cases, religious and non-religious crimes were seen as distinct but equivalent. The treatment of public blasphemy and street swindlers was similar (since both involved "misleading the public in a harmful way"). Making counterfeit currency and heretic proselytism were also treated similarly; both of them were punished by death and subdivided in similar ways since both were "spreading falsifications". In general heresy and falsifications of material documents were treated similarly by the Spanish Inquisition, indicating that they may have been thought of as equivalent actions.

Trials were often further complicated by the attempts of witnesses or victims to add further charges, especially witchcraft. Like in the case of Eleno de Céspedes, charges for witchcraft done in this way, or in general, were quickly dismissed but they often show in the statistics as investigations made.

Beyond its role in religious affairs, the Inquisition was also an institution at the service of the monarchy. The Inquisitor General, in charge of the Holy Office, was designated by the crown. The Inquisitor General was the only public office whose authority stretched to all the kingdoms of Spain (including the American viceroyalties), except for a brief period (1507-1518) during which there were two Inquisitors General, one in the kingdom of Castile, and the other in Aragon.

The Inquisitor General presided over the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition (generally abbreviated as "Council of the Suprema"), created in 1483, which was made up of six members named directly by the crown (the number of members of the Suprema varied over the course of the Inquisition's history, but it was never more than 10). Over time, the authority of the Suprema grew at the expense of the power of the Inquisitor General.

The Suprema met every morning, except for holidays, and for two hours in the afternoon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The morning sessions were devoted to questions of faith, while the afternoons were reserved for "minor heresies" cases of perceived unacceptable sexual behavior, bigamy, witchcraft, etc.

Below the Suprema were the various tribunals of the Inquisition, which were originally itinerant, installing themselves where they were necessary to combat heresy, but later being established in fixed locations. During the first phase, numerous tribunals were established, but the period after 1495 saw a marked tendency towards centralization.

In the kingdom of Castile, the following permanent tribunals of the Inquisition were established:

There were only four tribunals in the kingdom of Aragon: Zaragoza and Valencia (1482), Barcelona (1484), and Majorca (1488). Ferdinand the Catholic also established the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily (1513), housed in Palermo, and Sardinia, in the town of Sassari. In the Americas, tribunals were established in Lima and in Mexico City (1569) and, in 1610, in Cartagena de Indias (present day Colombia).

Structure of the Spanish Inquisition

Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, calificadors (qualifiers), an alguacil (bailiff), and a fiscal (prosecutor); new positions were added as the institution matured. The inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians; in 1608 Philip III even stipulated that all inquisitors needed to have a background in law. The inquisitors did not typically remain in the position for a long time: for the Court of Valencia, for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests who were not members of religious orders) and had a university education.

The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation, investigating the denunciations and interrogating the witnesses by the use of physical and mental torture. The calificadores were generally theologians; it fell to them to determine whether the defendant's conduct added up to a crime against the faith. Consultants were expert jurists who advised the court in questions of procedure. The court had, in addition, three secretaries: the notario de secuestros (Notary of Property), who registered the goods of the accused at the moment of his detention; the notario del secreto (Notary of the Secret), who recorded the testimony of the defendant and the witnesses; and the escribano general (General Notary), secretary of the court. The alguacil was the executive arm of the court, responsible for detaining, jailing, and physically torturing the defendant. Other civil employees were the nuncio, ordered to spread official notices of the court, and the alcaide, the jailer in charge of feeding the prisoners.

In addition to the members of the court, two auxiliary figures existed that collaborated with the Holy Office: the familiares and the comissarios (commissioners). Familiares were lay collaborators of the Inquisition, who had to be permanently at the service of the Holy Office. To become a familiar was considered an honor, since it was a public recognition of limpieza de sangre-Old Christian status-and brought with it certain additional privileges. Although many nobles held the position, most of the familiares came from the ranks of commoners. The commissioners, on the other hand, were members of the religious orders who collaborated occasionally with the Holy Office.

One of the most striking aspects of the organization of the Inquisition was its form of financing: devoid of its own budget, the Inquisition depended exclusively on the confiscation of the goods of the denounced. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of those prosecuted were rich men. That the situation was open to abuse is evident, as stands out in the memorandum that a converso from Toledo directed to Charles I:

Your Majesty must provide, before all else, that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the properties of the condemned, because if that is the case if they do not burn they do not eat.

When the Inquisition arrived in a city, the first step was the Edict of Grace. Following the Sunday Mass, the Inquisitor would proceed to read the edict; it explained possible heresies and encouraged all the congregation to come to the tribunals of the Inquisition to "relieve their consciences". They were called Edicts of Grace because all of the self-incriminated who presented themselves within a period of grace (usually ranging from thirty to forty days) were offered the possibility of reconciliation with the Church without severe punishment. The promise of benevolence was effective, and many voluntarily presented themselves to the Inquisition and were often encouraged to denounce others who had also committed offences, informants being the Inquisition's primary source of information. After about 1500, the Edicts of Grace were replaced by the Edicts of Faith, which left out the grace period and instead encouraged the denunciation of those guilty.

The denunciations were anonymous, and the defendants had no way of knowing the identities of their accusers. This was one of the points most criticized by those who opposed the Inquisition (for example, the Cortes of Castile, in 1518). In practice, false denunciations were frequent. Denunciations were made for a variety of reasons, from genuine concern to rivalries and personal jealousies.

After a denunciation, the case was examined by the calificadores, who had to determine whether there was heresy involved, followed by the detention of the accused. In practice many were detained in preventive custody, and many cases of lengthy incarcerations occurred, lasting up to two years before the calificadores examined the case.

Detention of the accused entailed the preventive sequestration of their property by the Inquisition. The property of the prisoner was used to pay for procedural expenses and the accused's own maintenance and costs. Often the relatives of the defendant found themselves in outright misery. This situation was remedied only following instructions written in 1561.

Some authors, such as Thomas William Walsh, stated that the entire process was undertaken with the utmost secrecy, as much for the public as for the accused, who were not informed about the accusations that were levied against them. Months or even years could pass without the accused being informed about why they were imprisoned. The prisoners remained isolated, and, during this time, the prisoners were not allowed to attend Mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of the Inquisition were no worse than those of secular authorities, and there are even certain testimonies that occasionally they were much better. There are few records of the time of the accused in prison, but the transcription of the trials repeatedly shows the accused being informed of every charge during the trial. They also show the accused's answers, in which they address each accusation specifically. Given that they would be informed anyway, it makes little sense that the accused would be kept in the dark prior to the trial, unless the investigation was still open.

The inquisitorial process consisted of a series of hearings, in which both the denouncers and the defendant gave testimony. A defense counsel was assigned to the defendant, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage them to speak the truth. The prosecution was directed by the fiscal. Interrogation of the defendant was done in the presence of the Notary of the Secreto, who meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation.

To defend themselves, the accused had two choices: abonos (to find favourable witnesses, akin to "substantive" evidence/testimony in Anglo-American law) or tachas (to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers were not trustworthy, akin to Anglo-American "impeachment" evidence/testimony).

Regarding the fairness of the trials, the structure of them was similar to modern trials and extremely advanced for the time. The Inquisition was dependent on the political power of the King. The lack of separation of powers allows assuming questionable fairness for certain scenarios. The fairness of the Inquisitorial tribunals seemed to be among the best in early modern Europe when it came to the trial of laymen. There are also testimonies by former prisoners that, if believed, suggest that said fairness was less than ideal when national or political interests were involved.

To obtain a confession or information relevant to an investigation, the Inquisition used torture, but not in a systematic way. It could only be applied when all other options, witnesses and experts had been used, the accused was found guilty or most likely guilty, and relevant information regarding accomplices or specific details were missing. It was applied mainly against those suspected of Judaizing and Protestantism beginning in the 16th century, in other words, "enemies of the state", since said crimes were usually thought to be associated with a larger organized network of either espionage or conspiracy with foreign powers. For example, Lea estimates that between 1575 and 1610 the court of Toledo tortured approximately a third of those processed for Protestant heresy. The recently opened Vatican Archives suggest even lower numbers. In other periods, the proportions varied remarkably. Torture was always a means to obtain the confession of the accused, not a punishment itself.

Inquisition torture chamber. Mémoires Historiques (1716)

Torture was employed in all civil and religious trials in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition used it more restrictively than was common at the time. Its main differentiation characteristic was that, as opposed to both civil trials and other inquisitions, it had very strict regulations regarding when, what, to whom, how many times, for how long and under what supervision it could be applied. The Spanish inquisition engaged in it far less often and with greater care than other courts. In the civil court, both Spanish and otherwise, there was no restriction regarding duration or any other point.

When: Torture was allowed only: "when sufficient proofs to confirm the culpability of the accused have been gathered by other means, and every other method of negotiation have been tried and exhausted". It was stated by the inquisitorial rule that information obtained through torment was not reliable, and confession should only be extracted this way when all needed information was already known and proven. Confessions obtained through torture could not be used to convict or sentence anyone.

What: The Spanish Inquisition was prohibited to "maim, mutilate, draw blood or cause any sort of permanent damage" to the prisoner.[citation needed ] Ecclesiastical tribunals were prohibited by church law from shedding blood. There was a closed list of the allowed torture methods. These were all tried and used in the civil courts all through Europe, and therefore known to be "safe" in this regard. Any other method, regardless of whether it was legal in the country or practiced in civil courts, was not allowed.

How many times: Each accusation allowed for a different number of torment sessions on the same person (once the "when" condition of the culpability being supported by the strong external evidence was fulfilled). The number was dependent on how "harmful to society" the crime was. Counterfeit currency allowed for a maximum of two. The most serious offences allowed for a maximum of eight.

For how long: "Torment" could be applied for a maximum of 15 minutes. The Roman Inquisition allowed for 30 minutes.

Supervision: A Physician was usually available in case of emergency. It was also required for a doctor to certify that the prisoner was healthy enough to go through the torment without suffering harm.

Per contrast, European civil trials from England to Italy and from Spain to Russia could use, and did use, torture without justification and for as long as they considered. So much so that there were serious tensions between the Inquisition and Philip III, since the Inquisitors complained that "those people sent to the prisons of the King blasphemed and accused themselves of heresy just to be sent under the Inquisitorial jurisdiction instead of the King's" and that was collapsing the Inquisition's tribunals. During the reign of Philip IV there were registered complaints of the Inquisitors about people who "Blasphemated, mostly in winter, just to be detained and fed inside the prison".

Despite some popular accounts, modern historians state that torture was only ever used to confirm information or a confession, not for punitive reasons.

The inside of a jail of the Spanish Inquisition, with a priest supervising his scribe while men and women are suspended from pulleys, tortured on the rack or burnt with torches. Etching.

Rafael Sabatinni states that among the methods of torture allowed, and common in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals, were garrucha, toca and the potro, even though those claims contradict both the Inquisitorial law and the claims made by Kamen. The application of the garrucha, also known as the strappado, consisted of suspending the victim from the ceiling by the wrists, which are tied behind the back. Sometimes weights were tied to the ankles, with a series of lifts and drops, during which the arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated.

The use of the toca (cloth), also called interrogatorio mejorado del agua (enhanced water interrogation), is better documented. It consisted of forcing the victim to ingest water poured from a jar so that they had the impression of drowning. The potro, the rack, in which the limbs were slowly pulled apart, was thought to be the instrument of torture used most frequently.

The assertion that confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum (literally: '[a person's] confession is truth, not made by way of torture') sometimes follows a description of how, after torture had ended, the subject freely confessed to the offences. Thus confessions following torture were deemed to be made of the confessor's free will, and hence valid.

Once the process concluded, the inquisidores met with a representative of the bishop and with the consultores (consultants), experts in theology or Canon Law (but not necessarily clergy themselves), which was called the consulta de fe (faith consultation/religion check). The case was voted and sentence pronounced, which had to be unanimous. In case of discrepancies, the Suprema had to be informed.

The results of the trial could be the following:

1. Although quite rare in actual practice, the defendant could be acquitted. Inquisitors did not wish to terminate the proceedings. If they did, and new evidence turned up later, they would be forced into reopening and re-presenting the old evidence.

2. The trial could be suspended, in which case the defendant, although under suspicion, went free (with the threat that the process could be continued at any time) or was held in long-term imprisonment until a trial commenced. When set free after a suspended trial it was considered a form of acquittal without specifying that the accusation had been erroneous.

3. The defendant could be penanced. Since they were considered guilty, they had to publicly abjure their crimes (de levi if it was a misdemeanor, and de vehementi if the crime were serious), and accept a public punishment. Among these were , exile, fines or even sentencing to service as oarsmen in royal galleys.

4. The defendant could be reconciled. In addition to the public ceremony in which the condemned was reconciled with the Catholic Church, more severe punishments were used, among them long sentences to jail or the galleys, plus the confiscation of all property. Physical punishments, such as whipping, were also used.

5. The most serious punishment was relaxation to the secular arm. The Inquisition had no power to actually kill the convict or determine the way they should die; that was a right of the King. Burning at the stake was a possibility, probably kept from the Papal Inquisition of Aragon, but a very uncommon one. This penalty was frequently applied to impenitent heretics and those who had relapsed. Execution was public. If the condemned repented, they were shown mercy by being garroted before their corpse was burned; if not, they were burned alive.

Frequently, cases were judged in absentia, and when the accused died before the trial finished, the condemned were burned in effigy.

The distribution of the punishments varied considerably over time. It is believed that sentences of death were enforced in the first stages within the long history of the Inquisition. According to García Cárcel, the court of Valencia, one of the most active, employed the death penalty in 40% of the convicts before 1530, but later that percentage dropped to 3%. By the middle of the 16th century, inquisition courts viewed torture as unnecessary and death sentences had become rare.

If the sentence was condemnatory, this implied that the condemned had to participate in the ceremony of an auto de fe (more commonly known in English as an auto-da-fé) that solemnized their return to the Church (in most cases), or punishment as an impenitent heretic. The autos-da-fé could be private ( auto particular) or public ( auto publico or auto general).

Although initially the public autos did not have any special solemnity nor sought a large attendance of spectators, with time they became solemn ceremonies, celebrated with large public crowds, amidst a festive atmosphere. The auto-da-fé eventually became a baroque spectacle, with staging meticulously calculated to cause the greatest effect among the spectators. The autos were conducted in a large public space (frequently in the largest plaza of the city), generally on holidays. The rituals related to the auto began the previous night (the "procession of the Green Cross") and sometimes lasted the whole day. The auto-da-fé frequently was taken to the canvas by painters: one of the better-known examples is the 1683 painting by Francisco Rizi, held by the Prado Museum in Madrid that represents the auto celebrated in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on 30 June 1680. The last public auto-da-fé took place in 1691.

The auto-da-fé involved a Catholic Mass, prayer, a public procession of those found guilty, and a reading of their sentences. They took place in public squares or esplanades and lasted several hours; ecclesiastical and civil authorities attended. Artistic representations of the auto-da-fé usually depict torture and the burning at the stake. This type of activity never took place during an auto-da-fé, which was in essence a religious act. Torture was not administered after a trial concluded, and executions were always held after and separate from the auto-da-fé, though in the minds and experiences of observers and those undergoing the confession and execution, the separation of the two might be experienced as merely a technicality.

The first recorded auto-da-fé was held in Paris in 1242, during the reign of Louis IX. The first Spanish auto-da-fé did not take place until 1481 in Seville; six of the men and women subjected to this first religious ritual were later executed. The Inquisition had limited power in Portugal, having been established in 1536 and officially lasting until 1821, although its influence was much weakened with the government of the Marquis of Pombal in the second half of the 18th century. Autos-da-fé also took place in Mexico, Brazil and Peru: contemporary historians of the Conquistadors such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo record them. They also took place in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, following the establishment of Inquisition there in 1562-1563.

Enlightenment era and the Inquisition's transformation

The arrival of the Enlightenment in Spain slowed inquisitorial activity. In the first half of the 18th century, 111 were condemned to be burned in person, and 117 in effigy, most of them for judaizing. In the reign of Philip V, there were 125 autos-da-fé, while in the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only 44.

During the 18th century, the Inquisition changed: Enlightenment ideas were the closest threat that had to be fought. The main figures of the Spanish Enlightenment were in favour of the abolition of the Inquisition, and many were processed by the Holy Office, among them Olavide, in 1776; Iriarte, in 1779; and Jovellanos, in 1796; Jovellanos sent a report to Charles IV in which he indicated the inefficiency of the Inquisition's courts and the ignorance of those who operated them: "... friars who take [the position] only to obtain gossip and exemption from the choir; who are ignorant of foreign languages, who only know a little scholastic theology."

In its new role, the Inquisition tried to accentuate its function of censoring publications but found that Charles III had secularized censorship procedures, and, on many occasions, the authorization of the Council of Castile hit the more intransigent position of the Inquisition. Since the Inquisition itself was an arm of the state, being within the Council of Castile, civil rather than ecclesiastical censorship usually prevailed. This loss of influence can also be explained because the foreign Enlightenment texts entered the peninsula through prominent members of the nobility or government, influential people with whom it was very difficult to interfere. Thus, for example, Diderot's Encyclopedia entered Spain thanks to special licenses granted by the king.

After the French Revolution the Council of Castile, fearing that revolutionary ideas would penetrate Spain's borders, decided to reactivate the Holy Office that was directly charged with the persecution of French works. An Inquisition edict of December 1789, that received the full approval of Charles IV and Floridablanca, stated that:

having news that several books have been scattered and promoted in these kingdoms... that, without being contented with the simple narration events of a seditious nature... seem to form a theoretical and practical code of independence from the legitimate powers.... destroying in this way the political and social order... the reading of thirty and nine French works is prohibited, under fine...

The fight from within against the Inquisition was almost always clandestine. The first texts that questioned the Inquisition and praised the ideas of Voltaire or Montesquieu appeared in 1759. After the suspension of pre-publication censorship on the part of the Council of Castile in 1785, the newspaper began the publication of protests against the activities of the Holy Office by means of a rationalist critique. Valentin de Foronda published Espíritu de los Mejores Diarios, a plea in favour of freedom of expression that was avidly read in the salons. Also, in the same vein, Manuel de Aguirre wrote On Toleration in El Censor, El Correo de los Ciegos and El Diario de Madrid.

During the reign of Charles IV of Spain (1788-1808), in spite of the fears that the French Revolution provoked, several events accelerated the decline of the Inquisition. The state stopped being a mere social organizer and began to worry about the well-being of the public. As a result, the land-holding power of the Church was reconsidered, in the señoríos and more generally in the accumulated wealth that had prevented social progress. The power of the throne increased, under which Enlightenment thinkers found better protection for their ideas. Manuel Godoy and Antonio Alcalá Galiano were openly hostile to an institution whose only role had been reduced to censorship and was the very embodiment of the Spanish Black Legend, internationally, and was not suitable to the political interests of the moment:

The Inquisition? Its old power no longer exists: the horrible authority that this bloodthirsty court had exerted in other times was reduced... the Holy Office had come to be a species of commission for book censorship, nothing more...

The Inquisition was first abolished during the domination of Napoleon and the reign of Joseph Bonaparte (1808-1812). In 1813, the liberal deputies of the Cortes of Cádiz also obtained its abolition, largely as a result of the Holy Office's condemnation of the popular revolt against French invasion. But the Inquisition was reconstituted when Ferdinand VII recovered the throne on 1 July 1814. Juan Antonio Llorente, who had been the Inquisition's general secretary in 1789, became a Bonapartist and published a critical history in 1817 from his French exile, based on his privileged access to its archives.

Possibly as a result of Llorente's criticisms, the Inquisition was once again temporarily abolished during the three-year Liberal interlude known as the Trienio liberal, but still the old system had not yet had its last gasp. Later, during the period known as the Ominous Decade, the Inquisition was not formally re-established, although, de facto, it returned under the so-called Congregation of the Meetings of Faith, tolerated in the dioceses by King Ferdinand. On 26 July 1826, the "Meetings of Faith" Congregation condemned and executed the school teacher Cayetano Ripoll, who thus became the last person known to be executed by the Inquisition.

On that day, Ripoll was hanged in Valencia, for having taught deist principles. This execution occurred against the backdrop of a European-wide scandal concerning the despotic attitudes still prevailing in Spain. Finally, on 15 July 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was definitively abolished by a Royal Decree signed by regent Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand VII's liberal widow, during the minority of Isabella II and with the approval of the President of the Cabinet Francisco Martínez de la Rosa.

The Alhambra Decree that had expelled the Jews was formally rescinded on 16 December 1968 by the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, after the Second Vatican Council rejected the idea that Jews are deicides.

The prohibitions, persecution and eventual Jewish mass emigration from Spain and Portugal probably had adverse effects on the development of the Spanish and the Portuguese economy. Jews and Non-Catholic Christians reportedly had substantially better numerical skills than the Catholic majority, which might be due to the Jewish religious doctrine, which focused strongly on education. Even when Jews were forced to quit their highly skilled urban occupations, their numeracy advantage persisted. However, during the inquisition, spillover-effects of these skills were rare because of forced separation and Jewish emigration, which was detrimental for economic development.

It is unknown exactly how much wealth was confiscated from converted Jews and others tried by the Inquisition. Wealth confiscated in one year of persecution in the small town of Guadaloupe paid the costs of building a royal residence. There are numerous records of the opinion of ordinary Spaniards of the time that "the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people". "They were burnt only for the money they had", a resident of Cuenca averred. "They burn only the well-off", said another. In 1504 an accused stated, "only the rich were burnt". In 1484 Catalina de Zamora was accused of asserting that "this Inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith. It is the goods that are the heretics." This saying passed into common usage in Spain. In 1524 a treasurer informed Charles V that his predecessor had received ten million ducats from the conversos, but the figure is unverified. In 1592 an inquisitor admitted that most of the fifty women he arrested were rich. In 1676, the Suprema claimed it had confiscated over 700,000 ducats for the royal treasury (which was paid money only after the Inquisition's own budget, amounting in one known case to only 5%). The property on Mallorca alone in 1678 was worth "well over 2,500,000 ducats".

García Cárcel estimates that the total number prosecuted by the Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000; applying the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of 1560-1700-about 2%-the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to death. Nevertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed. Other authors disagree and estimate a max death toll between 1% and 5%, (depending on the time span used) combining all the processes the inquisition carried, both religious and non-religious ones. In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000-60,000).

Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of the Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National Historical Archive of Spain (Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the annual relations of all processes between 1540 and 1700. This material provides information for approximately 44,674 judgments. These 44,674 cases include 826 executions in persona and 778 in effigie (i.e. an effigy was burned). This material is far from being complete-for example, the tribunal of Cuenca is entirely omitted, because no relaciones de causas from this tribunal have been found, and significant gaps concern some other tribunals (e.g., Valladolid). Many more cases not reported to the Suprema are known from the other sources (i.e., no relaciones de causas from Cuenca have been found, but its original records have been preserved), but were not included in Contreras-Henningsen's statistics for the methodological reasons. William Monter estimates 1000 executions between 1530 and 1630 and 250 between 1630 and 1730.

The archives of the Suprema only provide information about processes prior to 1560. To study the processes themselves, it is necessary to examine the archives of the local tribunals, the majority of which have been lost to the devastation of war, the ravages of time or other events. Some archives have survived including those of Toledo, where 12,000 were judged for offences related to heresy, mainly minor "blasphemy", and those of Valencia. These indicate that the Inquisition was most active in the period between 1480 and 1530 and that during this period the percentage condemned to death was much more significant than in the years that followed. Modern estimates show approximately 2,000 executions in persona in the whole of Spain up to 1530.

Statistics for the period 1540-1700

The statistics of Henningsen and Contreras are based entirely on relaciones de causas. The number of years for which cases are documented varies for different tribunals. Data for the Aragonese Secretariat are probably complete, some small lacunae may concern only Valencia and possibly Sardinia and Cartagena, but the numbers for Castilian Secretariat-except Canaries and Galicia-should be considered as minimal due to gaps in the documentation. In some cases it is remarked that the number does not concern the whole period 1540-1700.

Table of sentences pronounced in the public autos da fe in Spain (excluding tribunals in Sicily, Sardinia and Latin America) between 1701 and 1746:

Author Toby Green notes that the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law" and sometimes had motives for imprisoning and sometimes executing alleged offenders other than for the purpose of punishing religious nonconformity, mainly in Hispanoamerica and Iberoamerica.

Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios about one Inquisitor, Diego Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two different women he then kept as mistresses. According to Barrios

the daughter of Diego Celemin was exceptionally beautiful, her parents and her husband did not want to give her to [Lucero], and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now has a child by her, and he has kept for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress.

Defenders of the Inquisition discrediting with Green are many and seem to be the growing trend in current scholarship. These authors do not necessarily deny the abuses of power but classify them as politically instigated and comparable to those of any other law enforcement body of the period. Criticisms, usually indirect, have gone from the suspiciously sexual overtones or similarities of these accounts with unrelated older antisemitic accounts of kidnap and torture, to the clear proofs of control that the king had over the institution, to the sources used by Green, or just by reaching completely different conclusions.

According to a 2021 study, "municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational attainment, and trust today."

How historians and commentators have viewed the Spanish Inquisition has changed over time and continues to be a source of controversy. Before and during the 19th-century historical interest focused on who was being persecuted. In the early and mid 20th century, historians examined the specifics of what happened and how it influenced Spanish history. In the later 20th and 21st century, historians have re-examined how severe the Inquisition really was, calling into question some of the assumptions made in earlier periods.

Before the rise of professional historians in the 19th century, the Spanish Inquisition had largely been portrayed by Protestant scholars who saw it as the archetypal symbol of Catholic intolerance and ecclesiastical power. The Spanish Inquisition for them was largely associated with the persecution of Protestants, or inexplicably, of witches. William H. Prescott described the Inquisition as an "eye that never slumbered". Despite the existence of extensive documentation regarding the trials and procedures, and to the Inquisition's deep bureaucratization, none of these sources was studied outside of Spain, and Spanish scholars arguing against the predominant view were automatically dismissed. The 19th-century professional historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador de los Ríos, were the first to successfully challenge this perception in the international sphere and get foreign scholars to take note of their discoveries. Said scholars would obtain international recognition and start a period of revision on the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition.

At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the groundbreaking History of the Inquisition in Spain. This influential work describes the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of progress." Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation in no uncertain terms, calling it "theocratic absolutism" at its worst. In the context of the polarization between Protestants and Catholics during the second half of the 19th century, some of Lea's contemporaries, as well as most modern scholars thought Lea's work had an anti-Catholic bias.

Starting in the 1920s, Jewish scholars picked up where Lea's work left off. They published Yitzhak Baer's History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos and, after World War II, the work of Haim Beinart, who for the first time published trial transcripts of cases involving conversos.

Contemporary historians who subscribe to the idea that the image of the Inquisition in historiography has been systematically deformed by the Black Legend include Edward Peters, Philip Wayne Powell, William S. Maltby, Richard Kagan, Margaret R. Greer, Helen Rawlings, Ronnie Hsia, Lu Ann Homza, Stanley G. Payne, Andrea Donofrio, Irene Silverblatt, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Charles Gibson, and Joseph Pérez. Contemporary historians who support the traditional view and deny the existence of a Black Legend include Toby Green. Contemporary historians who partially accept an impact of the Black Legend but deny other aspects of the hypothesis it includes Henry Kamen, David Nirenberg and Karen Armstrong.

The works of Juderias in (1913) and other Spanish scholars prior to him were mostly ignored by international scholarship until 1960.

One of the first books to build on them and internationally challenge the classical view was The Spanish Inquisition (1965) by Henry Kamen. Kamen argued that the Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or as powerful as commonly believed. The book was very influential and largely responsible for subsequent studies in the 1970s to try to quantify (from archival records) the Inquisition's activities from 1480 to 1834. Those studies showed there was an initial burst of activity against conversos suspected of relapsing into Judaism, and a mid-16th century pursuit of Protestants, but the Inquisition served principally as a forum Spaniards occasionally used to humiliate and punish people they did not like: blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners and, in Aragon, homosexuals, and horse smugglers. Kamen went on to publish two more books in 1985 and 2006 that incorporated new findings, further supporting the view that the Inquisition was not as bad as once described by Lea and others. Along similar lines is Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988).

One of the most important works about the inquisition's relation to the Jewish conversos or New Christians is The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (1995/2002) by Benzion Netanyahu. It challenges the view that most conversos were actually practicing Judaism in secret and were persecuted for their crypto-Judaism. Rather, according to Netanyahu, the persecution was fundamentally racial, and was a matter of envy of their success in Spanish society. This view has been challenged multiple times, and with some reasonable divergences the majority of historians either align with religious causes or with merely cultural ones, with no significant racial element.

There was no remedy, from Los Caprichos, 1797-98, by Francisco de Goya.

The literature of the 18th century approaches the theme of the Inquisition from a critical point of view. In by Voltaire, the Inquisition appears as the epitome of intolerance and arbitrary justice in Europe.

During the Romantic Period, the Gothic novel, which was primarily a genre developed in Protestant countries, frequently associated Catholicism with terror and repression. This vision of the Spanish Inquisition appears in, among other works, (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (set in Madrid during the Inquisition, but can be seen as commenting on the French Revolution and the Terror); Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki.

The literature of the 19th century tends to focus on the element of torture employed by the Inquisition. In France, in the early 19th century, the epistolary novel Cornelia Bororquia, or the Victim of the Inquisition, which has been attributed to Spaniard Luiz Gutiérrez, and is based on the case of María de Bohórquez, ferociously criticizes the Inquisition and its representatives. The Inquisition also appears in one of the chapters of the novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which imagines an encounter between Jesus and the Inquisitor General. One of the best-known stories of Edgar Allan Poe, " The Pit and the Pendulum", explores the use of torture by the Inquisition.

The Inquisition also appears in 20th-century literature. La Gesta del Marrano, by the Argentine author Marcos Aguinis, portrays the length of the Inquisition's arm to reach people in Argentina during the 16th and 17th centuries. The first book in Les Daniels' "Don Sebastian Vampire Chronicles", The Black Castle (1978), is set in 15th-century Spain and includes both descriptions of Inquisitorial questioning and an auto-da-fé, as well as Tomás de Torquemada, who is featured in one chapter. The Marvel Comics series Marvel 1602 shows the Inquisition targeting Mutants for "blasphemy". The character Magneto also appears as the Grand Inquisitor. The Captain Alatriste novels by the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte are set in the early 17th century. The second novel, Purity of Blood, has the narrator being tortured by the Inquisition and describes an auto-da-fé. Carme Riera's novella, published in 1994, Dins el Darrer Blau ( In the Last Blue) is set during the repression of the chuetas ( conversos from Majorca) at the end of the 17th century. In 1998, the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes published the historical novel The Heretic, about the Protestants of Valladolid and their repression by the Inquisition. Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile deals directly with the Spanish Inquisition during the first part of the novel.

In the novel La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falcones, published in 2006 and set in the 14th century, there are scenes of inquisition investigations in small towns and a great scene in Barcelona.

The 1947 epic Captain from Castile by Darryl F. Zanuck, starring Tyrone Power, uses the Inquisition as the major plot point of the film. It tells how powerful families used their evils to ruin their rivals. The first part of the film shows this and the reach of the Inquisition reoccurs throughout this movie following Pedro De Vargas (played by Power) even to the 'New World'.

The Spanish Inquisition segment of the 1981 Mel Brooks movie History of the World Part I is a comedic musical performance based on the activities of the first Inquisitor General of Spain, Tomás de Torquemada.

The film The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky, features the Spanish Inquisition as part of a plot in 1500 when the Grand Inquisitor threatens Queen Isabella's life.

Goya's Ghosts (2006) by Miloš Forman is set in Spain between 1792 and 1809 and focuses realistically on the role of the Inquisition and its end under Napoleon's rule.

The film Assassin's Creed (2016) by Justin Kurzel, starring Michael Fassbender, is set in both modern times and Spain during the Inquisition. The film follows Callum Lynch (played by Fassbender) as he is forced to relive the memories of his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha (also played by Fassbender), an Assassin during the Spanish Inquisition.

The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961).

(Pedro Olea, 1984), a film, about the Logroño trial of the Zugarramurdi witches.

Tomás de Torquemada is portrayed in 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (1992)

The Grand Inquisitor of Spain plays a part in (1867), a play by Friedrich Schiller (which was the basis for the opera in five acts by Giuseppe Verdi, in which the Inquisitor is also featured, and the third act is dedicated to an auto-da-fé).

The 1965 musical Man of La Mancha depicts a fictionalized account of the author Miguel de Cervantes' run-in with Spanish authorities. The character of Cervantes produces a play-within-a-play of his unfinished manuscript, Don Quixote, while he awaits sentencing by the Inquisition.

In the Monty Python comedy team's Spanish Inquisition sketches, an inept Inquisitor group repeatedly bursts into scenes after someone utters the words "I didn't expect to find a Spanish Inquisition", screaming "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" The Inquisition then uses ineffectual forms of torture, including a dish-drying rack, soft cushions and a comfy chair.

The Spanish Inquisition features as a main plotline element of the 2009 video game Assassin's Creed II: Discovery.

The Universe of Warhammer 40,000 borrows several elements and concepts of the Catholic church Imaginarium, including the notion of the Black Legend's ideal of a fanatic Inquisitors, for some of its troops in Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr.

The video game Blasphemous portrays a nightmarish version of the Spanish Inquisition, where the protagonist, named 'The Penitent one' wears a capirote (cone-shaped hat). The Penitent one battles twisted religious iconography and meets many characters attempting to atone for their sins along the way.

1. ^ Data for executions for witchcraft: Levack, Brian P. (199). The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (2nd ed.). London and New York: Longman. ISBN 978-0582080690. OCLC 30154582. And see Witch trials in Early Modern Europe for more detail.

2. ^ Splendiani, Ana María (1997). Cincuenta años de la inquisición en el Tribunal de Cartagena de Indias. p. 86. the American Inquisition was never involved in the conversion and evangelisation of the Indians, as they were outside its jurisdiction from the very promulgation of the edicts founding the American courts.

3. Hans-Jürgen Prien (2012). Christianity in Latin America: Revised and Expanded Edition. Brill. p. 11. ISBN 978-90-04-22262-5.

4. Letter of Hasdai Crescas, Shevaṭ Yehudah by Solomon ibn Verga (ed. Dr. M. Wiener), Hannover 1855, pp. 128-130 (pp. 138-140 in PDF); Fritz Kobler, Letters of the Jews through the Ages, London 1952, pp. 272-275; Mitre Fernández, Emilio (1994). Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editorial (ed.). Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III : el pogrom de 1391 [The Castilian Jews at the time of Henry III: the 1391 pogrom] (in Spanish). Valladolid University. ISBN 978-84-7762-449-3.; Solomon ibn Verga, Shevaṭ Yehudah (The Sceptre of Judah), Lvov 1846, p. 76 in PDF.

5. Letter from ^ Hasdai Crescas to the congregations of Avignon, published as an appendix to Wiener's edition of Shevaṭ Yehudah of Solomon ibn Verga, in which he names the Jewish communities affected by the persecution of 1391. See pp. 138-140 in PDF (Hebrew); Fritz Kobler, Letters of the Jews through the Ages, London 1952, pp. 272-275.

6. ^ Solomon ibn Verga, Shevaṭ Yehudah (The Sceptre of Judah), Lvov 1846, pp. 41 (end) - 42 in PDF); Kamen (1998), p. 17. Kamen cites approximate numbers for Valencia (250) and Barcelona (400), but no solid data about Córdoba.

7. According to Gedaliah Ibn Yechia, these disturbances were caused by a malicious report spread about the Jews. See: ^ Gedaliah Ibn Yechia, Shalshelet Ha-Kabbalah Jerusalem 1962, p. רסח, in PDF p. 277 (top) (Hebrew); Solomon ibn Verga, Shevat Yehudah, Lvov 1846 (p. 76 in PDF) (Hebrew).

8. Notably Bishop ^ Pablo de Santa Maria, author of Scrutinium Scripturarum, Jeronimo de Santa Fe (Hebraomastix) and Pedro de la Caballeria (Zelus Christi contra Judaeos). All three were conversos. (Kamen (1998), p. 39).

9. Notably the ^ Libro verde de Aragon and Tizón de la nobleza de España (cited in Kamen (1998), p. 38).

10. ^ Pérez, Joseph (2005). The Spanish Inquisition: A History. Yale University Press.

11. ^ Elvira, Roca Barea María, and Arcadi Espada. Imperiofobia Y Leyenda Negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos Y El Imperio Español. Madrid: Siruela, 2017

12. ^ González, Óscar (2009). El Rey Y El Papa: Política Y Diplomacia En Los Albores Del Renacimiento (Castilla En El Siglo XV). Sílex.

13. The Marranos of Spain. From the late XIVth to the early XVIth Century, 1966. Ithaca, 1999

14. ^ The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Spanish Inquisition Timeline". Encyclopaedia Britannica.

15. ^ Archbishop Arnold H. Mathew, The Life and Times of Rodrigo Borgia, pp. 52-53. Quote: "Isabella's Confessor, Torquemada, had imbued her with the idea that the suppression of all heresy within her realms was a sacred duty. She had, therefore, in November 1478, obtained a bull from the Pope, Sixtus IV., for the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile. Many modern writers have sought to reduce her share in the introduction of this terrible institution, but it must be remembered that Isabella herself probably considered it a meritorious action to punish with inhuman barbarity those whom she looked upon as the enemies of the Almighty. In 1480, two Dominicans were appointed by her, as Inquisitors, to set up their tribunal at Seville. Before the end of the year 1481, 2,000 victims were burned alive in Andalusia alone. The Pope himself became alarmed and threatened to withdraw the bull, but Ferdinand intimated that he would make the Inquisition altogether an independent tribunal. This it became later for all practical purposes, and its iniquitous proceedings continued unchecked."

16. ^ Murphy, Cullen (2012). God's jury : the Inquisition and the making of the modern world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-618-09156-0.

17. Trevor J. Dadson: ^ The Assimilation of Spain's Moriscos: Fiction or Reality? Archived 12 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine. Journal of Levantine Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, Winter 2011, pp. 11-30

18. ^ Boase, Roger (4 April 2002). "The Muslim Expulsion from Spain". History Today. 52 (4). The majority of those permanently expelled settling in the Maghreb or Barbary Coast, especially in Oran, Tunis, Tlemcen, Tetuán, Rabat and Salé. Many travelled overland to France, but after the assassination of Henry of Navarre by Ravaillac in May 1610, they were forced to emigrate to Italy, Sicily or Constantinople.

19. ^ Adams, Susan M.; Bosch, Elena; Balaresque, Patricia L.; Ballereau, Stéphane J.; Lee, Andrew C.; Arroyo, Eduardo; López-Parra, Ana M.; Aler, Mercedes; Grifo, Marina S. Gisbert; Brion, Maria; Carracedo, Angel; Lavinha, João; Martínez-Jarreta, Begoña; Quintana-Murci, Lluis; Picornell, Antònia; Ramon, Misericordia; Skorecki, Karl; Behar, Doron M.; Calafell, Francesc; Jobling, Mark A. (December 2008). "The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula". The American Journal of Human Genetics. 83 (6): 725-736. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.11.007. PMC . PMID 19061982.

20. ^ Vínculos Historia: The Moriscos who remained. The permanence of Islamic origin population in Early Modern Spain: Kingdom of Granada, XVII-XVIII centuries (In Spanish)

21. ^ Kamen (1998), p. 99 gives the figure of about 100 executions for heresy of any kind between 1559 and 1566. He compares these figures with those condemned to death in other European countries during the same period, concluding that in similar periods England, under Mary Tudor, executed about twice as many for heresy: in France, three times the number, and ten times as many in the Low Countries.

22. William R. Denslow, Harry S. Truman: 10,000 Famous Freemasons, ISBN 1-4179-7579-2.

23. ^ Bleiberg, Germán; Ihrie, Maureen; Pérez, Janet (1993). Dictionary of the Literature of the Iberian Peninsula. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 374-. ISBN 978-0-313-28731-2.

24. ^ Walkley, Clive (2010). Juan Esquivel: A Master of Sacred Music During the Spanish Golden Age. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 7-. ISBN 978-1-84383-587-5.

25. Statistics are not available for Spanish oarsmen, but the general state of Mediterranean oared galleys circa 1570 was grim; cf. ^ Crowley, Roger (2009). Empires of the sea: The siege of Malta, the battle of Lepanto, and the contest for the center of the world. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. pp. 77-78. ISBN 978-0-8129-77646.: "... galley slaves led lives bitter and short. ... One way or another the oared galley consumed men like fuel. Each dying wretch dumped overboard had to be replaced-and there were never enough."

26. ^ Cc̀eres, Fernando (2007). Estudios Sobre Cultura, Guerra Y Polt̕ica En La Corona De Castilla [Studies Over War Culture and Politics in the Kingdom of Castile]. Editorial Csic Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientf̕icas. siglos xiv-xvii.

27. ^ Kaler, Amy (1998). Fertility, Gender and War: The culture of contraception. University of Minnesota Press.

28. Bethencourt, Francisco. La Inquisición En La Época Moderna: España, Portugal E Italia, Siglos xv-xix. Madrid: Akal, 1997.

29. Haliczer, Stephen, Inquisition and society in the kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834, p. 79, University of California Press, 1990

30. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (2020). "The Cost of Torture: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition". Security Studies. 29 (3): 457-492. doi:10.1080/09636412.2020.1761441. ISSN 0963-6412. S2CID 219405563.

31. Church properties, in general, and those of the Holy Office in particular, occupied large tracts of today's ^ Castile and León, Extremadura and Andalucia. The properties were given under feudal terms to farmers or to localities who used them as community property with many restrictions, owing a part of the rent, generally in cash, to the church.

32. ^ Juif, Dácil; Baten, Joerg; Pérez-Artés, Mari Carmen (2020). "Numeracy of Religious Minorities in Spain and Portugal During the Inquisition Era". The Revista de Historia Económica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History. 38: 147-184. doi:10.1017/S021261091900034X. hdl:10016/36127. S2CID 214199340.

33. For full account see: Gustav Henningsen, ^ The Database of the Spanish Inquisition. The relaciones de causas project revisited, in: Heinz Mohnhaupt, Dieter Simon, Vorträge zur Justizforschung, Vittorio Klostermann, 1992, pp. 43-85.

34. Henningsen, The Database of the Spanish Inquisition, p. 84.

35. Henningsen, The Database of the Spanish Inquisition, p. 58.

36. See H. Ch. Lea, ^ The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, London 1922, pp. 204 ff. and The Catholic Encyclopedia: Mexico.

37. One burned in 1567 (E. Schäffer, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Spanischen Protestantismus, Bd. 2, Gütersloh 1902, pp. 41-42), 13 in the period 1570-1625 (W. Monter, ^ Frontiers of heresy, p. 48), 5 burned in 1627, another 5 burned in 1655 (Kamen (2005), p. 266) and 3 burned alive in 1665 (Miriam Bodian, Dying in the law of Moses: crypto-Jewish martyrdom in the Iberian world, Indiana University Press 2007, p. 219).

38. Four burned between 1553 and 1558 (W. Monter, ^ Frontiers of heresy, pp. 37-38 n. 22), one in 1561 (W. Monter, Frontiers of heresy, p. 233), 19 others in the period 1570-1625 (W. Monter, Frontiers of heresy, p. 48) and 10 burned in 1654 (Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. V, 2009, p. 91).

39. This number includes 7 persons burned ca. 1545 (H. Ch. Lea, ^ History of the Inquisition of Spain, New York 1907, vol. III, p. 189), 9 persons burned in 1550-52 (Flora García Ivars, La represión en el tribunal inquisitorial de Granada, 1550-1819, ed. Akal, 1991, p. 194), 14 persons burned in the 1560s. (W. Monter, p. 44, 233), 24 burned between 1570 and 1625 (W. Monter, p. 48), 12 burned in 1654 (Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. V, 2009, p. 92) and 6 burned in 1672 (A. J. Saraiva, H. P. Salomon, I. S. D. Sassoon: The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians 1536-1765. Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2001, p. 217 n. 62).

40. This number includes 2 executions in the ^ auto-da-fé in 1545 (W.Monter, Frontiers of heresy, p. 38), 114 executions in the autos da fe between 1559 and 1660 (Victoria González de Caldas, Judíos o cristianos?, Universidad de Sevilla, 2000, p. 528) and 12 executions in the autos da fe between 1666 and 1695 (Consuelo Maqueda Abreu, El auto de fe, Madrid 1992, pp. 99-100).

41. 13 burned in the ^ autos da fe between 1555 and 1569 (E. Schäffer, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Spanischen Protestantismus, Bd. 2, Gütersloh 1902, p. 79-91.), 25 burned between 1570 and 1625 (W. Monter, p. 48), 2 burned between 1648 and 1699 (H. Ch. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, vol. IV, New York 1907, p. 524; cf. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva & Bartolomé Escandell Bonet (ed.), Historia de la Inquisición en España y América, vol. 1, Madrid 1984, p. 1395), and 26 burned in two autos da fe in Madrid w 1632 and 1680 (H. Ch. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, vol. III, New York 1907, p. 228).

42. This number includes 6 executions given by Henningsen and Contreras for the period 1620-1670 (Henningsen, ^ The Database of the Spanish Inquisition, pp. 58 and 65), 26 burned in two famous autos-da-fé in 1559 (W.Monter, Frontiers of heresy, pp. 41, 44),2 burned in 1561 (W. Monter, pp. 41, 44, 233),15 burned between 1562 and 1567 (E. Schäffer, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Spanischen Protestantismus, Bd. 3, Gütersloh 1902, p. 131) and 5 burned in 1691 (H. Ch. Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain, New York 1907, vol. III, p. 197).

43. ^ Barrios, Manuel (1991). El Tribunal de la Inquisicion en Andalucia: Seleccion de Textos y Documentos. Seville: J. Rodriguez Castillejo S.A. p. 58.

44. ^ Drelichman, Mauricio; Vidal-Robert, Jordi; Voth, Hans-Joachim (2021). "The long-run effects of religious persecution: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (33): e2022881118. Bibcode:2021PNAS..11822881D. doi:10.1073/pnas.2022881118. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC . PMID 34389666.

45. ^ "A Kinder, Gentler Inquisition", by Richard Kagan in The New York Times, 19 April 1998.

46. "Henry Charles Lea Papers - Biographical Sketch". Univ. of Penn. -Penn Special Collections. 11 January 2003.

47. ^ Van Hove, Brian (12 November 1996). "A New Industry: The Inquisition". Catholic.net. Archived from the original on 5 April 2007.

48. Vicente Ángel Álvarez Palenzuela. ^ Judíos y conversos en la España medieval. Estado de la cuestión (Jews and converts in medieval Spain. Estate of the matter). Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) eHumanista/Converso 4 (2015):156-191 It can be checked for free here.

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

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"After a Muslim resurgence under the Almohads in the 12th century, the great Moorish strongholds in the South fell to Christian forces in the 13th century after the decisive battle of navas de tolosa (1212)—cordoba in 1236 and seville in (1248)"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista

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It was the first of a series of religious wars 'When the 11th century came the Seljuk was being threatened by the local Christian then later one Seljuk was taken over by them'. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade)

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The First Crusade (1096-1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic rule. While Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule for hundreds of years, by the 11th century the Seljuk takeover of the region threatened local Christian populations, pilgrimages from the West, and the Byzantine Empire itself. The earliest initiative for the First Crusade began in 1095 when Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested military support from the Council of Piacenza in the empire's conflict with the Seljuk-led Turks. This was followed later in the year by the Council of Clermont, during which Pope Urban II supported the Byzantine request for military assistance and also urged faithful Christians to undertake an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

This call was met with an enthusiastic popular response across all social classes in western Europe. Mobs of predominantly poor Christians numbering in the thousands, led by Peter the Hermit, a French priest, were the first to respond. What has become known as the People's Crusade passed through Germany and indulged in wide-ranging anti-Jewish activities, including the Rhineland massacres. On leaving Byzantine-controlled territory in Anatolia, they were annihilated in a Turkish ambush led by the Seljuk Kilij Arslan at the Battle of Civetot in October 1096.

In what has become known as the Princes' Crusade, members of the high nobility and their followers embarked in late-summer 1096 and arrived at Constantinople between November and April the following year. This was a large feudal host led by notable Western European princes: southern French forces under Raymond IV of Toulouse and Adhemar of Le Puy; men from Upper and Lower Lorraine led by Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne; Italo-Norman forces led by Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred; as well as various contingents consisting of northern French and Flemish forces under Robert Curthose (Robert II of Normandy), Stephen of Blois, Hugh of Vermandois, and Robert II of Flanders. In total and including non-combatants, the forces are estimated to have numbered as many as 100,000.

The crusader forces gradually arrived in Anatolia. With Kilij Arslan absent, a Frankish attack and Byzantine naval assault during the Siege of Nicaea in June 1097 resulted in an initial crusader victory. In July, the crusaders won the Battle of Dorylaeum, fighting Turkish lightly armoured mounted archers. After a difficult march through Anatolia, the crusaders began the Siege of Antioch, capturing the city in June 1098. Jerusalem, under the Fatimids, was reached in June 1099 and the Siege of Jerusalem resulted in the city being taken by assault from 7 June to 15 July 1099, during which its residents were ruthlessly massacred. A Fatimid counterattack was repulsed later that year at the Battle of Ascalon, ending the First Crusade. Afterwards the majority of the crusaders returned home.

Four Crusader states were established in the Holy Land: the Kingdom of Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon but not using the title king, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Tripoli. The Crusader presence remained in the region in some form until the loss of the last major Crusader stronghold in the Siege of Acre in 1291. After this loss of all Crusader territory in the Levant, there were no further substantive attempts to recover the Holy Land.

Historical context

Christianity and Islam had been in conflict since the latter's founding in the 7th century. Less than a century passed from the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 632 until the Islamic occupation of Jerusalem and the Levant beginning in 638, and Muslim invaders landed in Spain. By the 11th century, Islamic control of Spain was gradually eroded by the Reconquista, but the situation in the Holy Land had deteriorated. The Fatimid dynasty ruled North Africa and swathes of Western Asia to include Jerusalem, Damascus and parts of the Mediterranean coastline from 969, but was at relative peace with the west. That all changed in 1073 with the loss of Jerusalem to the Seljuk dynasty.

Situation in Europe

By the 11th century, the population of Europe had increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish. The Catholic Church had become a dominant influence on Western civilization. Society was organized by manorialism and feudalism, political structures whereby knights and other nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors.

In the period from 1050 until 1080, the Gregorian Reform movement developed increasingly more assertive policies, eager to increase its power and influence. This prompted conflict with eastern Christians rooted in the doctrine of papal supremacy. The Eastern church viewed the pope as only one of the five patriarchs of the Church, alongside the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem. In 1054 differences in custom, creed and practice spurred Pope Leo IX to send a legation to the Patriarch of Constantinople, which ended in mutual excommunication and an East-West Schism.

Early Christians were used to the employment of violence for communal purposes. A Christian theology of war inevitably evolved from the point when Roman citizenship and Christianity became linked. Citizens were required to fight against the empire's enemies. Dating from the works of the 4th-century theologian Augustine of Hippo a doctrine of holy war developed. Augustine wrote that an aggressive war was sinful, but war could be justified if proclaimed by a legitimate authority such as a king or bishop, it was defensive or for the recovery of lands, and it did not involve excessive violence. The breakdown of the Carolingian Empire in Western Europe created a warrior caste who now had little to do but fight amongst themselves. Violent acts were commonly used for dispute resolution, and the papacy attempted to mitigate it.

Pope Alexander II developed recruitment systems via oaths for military resourcing that Gregory VII further extended across Europe. These were deployed by the Church in the Christian conflicts with Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and for the Norman conquest of Sicily. Gregory VII went further in 1074, planning a display of military power to reinforce the principle of papal sovereignty in a holy war supporting Byzantium against the Seljuks, but was unable to build support for this. Theologian Anselm of Lucca took the decisive step towards an authentic crusader ideology, stating that fighting for legitimate purposes could result in the remission of sins.

On the Iberian Peninsula there was no significant Christian polity. The Christian realms of León, Navarre and Catalonia lacked a common identity and shared history based on tribe or ethnicity so they frequently united and divided during the 11th and 12th centuries. Although small, all developed an aristocratic military technique and in 1031 the disintegration of the Caliphate of Córdoba in southern Spain created the opportunity for the territorial gains that later became known as the Reconquista. In 1063, William VIII of Aquitaine led a combined force of French, Aragonese and Catalan knights to take the city of Barbastro that had been in Muslim hands since the year 711. This had the full support of Alexander II, and a truce was declared in Catalonia with indulgences granted to the participants. It was a holy war but differed from the First Crusade in that there was no pilgrimage, no vow, and no formal authorisation by the church. Shortly before the First Crusade, Urban II had encouraged the Iberian Christians to take Tarragona, using much of the same symbolism and rhetoric that was later used to preach the crusade to the people of Europe.

The Italo-Normans were successful in seizing much of Southern Italy and Sicily from the Byzantines and North African Arabs in the decades before the First Crusade. This brought them into conflict with the Papacy leading to a campaign against them by Pope Leo IX who they defeated at Civitate, although when they invaded Muslim Sicily in 1059 they did so under a papal banner: the Invexillum sancti Petrior, or banner of St. Peter. Robert Guiscard captured the Byzantine city of Bari in 1071 and campaigned along the Eastern Adriatic coast around Dyrrachium in 1081 and 1085.

Situation in the East

Since its founding, the Byzantine Empire was an historic center of wealth, culture and military power. Under Basil II, the territorial recovery of the empire reached its furthest extent in 1025. The Empire's frontiers stretched east to Iran, Bulgaria and much of southern Italy were under control, and piracy in the Mediterranean Sea had been suppressed. Relations with the Empire's Islamic neighbours were no more quarrelsome than relations with the Slavs or Western Christians. Normans in Italy; Pechenegs, Serbs and Cumans to the north; and Seljuk Turks in the east all competed with the Empire, and to meet these challenges the emperors recruited mercenaries, even on occasion from their enemies.

The Islamic world also experienced great success since its foundation in the 7th century, with major changes to come. The first waves of Turkic migration into the Middle East enmeshed Arab and Turkic history from the 9thcentury. The status quo in Western Asia was challenged by later waves of Turkish migration, particularly the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the 10thcentury. These were a minor ruling clan from Transoxania. They converted to Islam and migrated into Iran to seek their fortune. In the following two decades they conquered Iran, Iraq and the Near East. The Seljuks and their followers were Sunni Muslims, which led to conflict in Palestine and Syria with the Shi'ite Fatimid Caliphate. The Seljuks were nomads, Turkish speaking, and occasionally shamanistic, unlike their sedentary, Arabic-speaking subjects. This was a difference that weakened power structures when combined with the Seljuks' habitual governance of territory based on political preferment and competition between independent princes rather than geography. Romanos IV Diogenes attempted to suppress the Seljuks' sporadic raiding, but was defeated at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the only time in history a Byzantine emperor became the prisoner of a Muslim commander. The battle was a stinging setback that presaged notable Seljuk gains, and contributed to the call for the First Crusade. Key cities such as Nicaea and Antioch were lost in 1081 and 1086 respectively, cities that were especially famous in the West due to their historical significance and would later also be targets of reconquest by the crusader armies.

From 1092 the status quo in the Middle East disintegrated following the death of the vizier and effective ruler of the Seljuk Empire, Nizam al-Mulk. This was closely followed by the deaths of the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah and the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir Billah. Wracked by confusion and division, the Islamic world disregarded the world beyond, so that, when the First Crusade arrived, it came as a surprise. Malik-Shah was succeeded in the Anatolian Sultanate of Rûm by Kilij Arslan, and in Syria by his brother Tutush I who started a civil war against Berkyaruq ibn Malikshah to become sultan himself. When Tutush was killed in 1095, his sons Ridwan and Duqaq inherited Aleppo and Damascus, respectively, further dividing Syria amongst emirs antagonistic towards each other, as well as Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul. Egypt and much of Palestine were controlled by the Fatimids. The Fatimids, under the nominal rule of caliph al-Musta'li but actually controlled by their vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah, lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks in 1073 but succeeded in recapturing the city in 1098 from the Artuqids, a smaller Turkish tribe associated with the Seljuks, just before the arrival of the crusaders.

Council of Clermont

Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont. Illustration from a copy of Sébastien Mamerot's Livre des Passages d'Outremer (Jean Colombe, c. 1472-75, BNF Fr. 5594)

The major ecclesiastical impetuses behind the First Crusade were the Council of Piacenza and subsequent Council of Clermont, both held in 1095 by Pope Urban II, and resulted in the mobilization of Western Europe to go to the Holy Land. Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, worried about the advances of the Seljuks into his territory, sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza in March 1095 to ask Pope Urban II for aid against the invading Turks.

In July 1095, Urban turned to his homeland of France to recruit men for the expedition. His travels there culminated in the ten-day Council of Clermont, where on 27 November he gave an impassioned sermon to a large audience of French nobles and clergy. There are five versions of the speech recorded by people who may have been at the council ( Baldric of Dol, Guibert of Nogent, Robert the Monk, and Fulcher of Chartres) or who went on crusade (Fulcher and the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum), as well as other versions found in the works of later historians (such as William of Malmesbury and William of Tyre). All of these versions were written after Jerusalem had been captured. Thus it is difficult to know what was actually said and what was recreated in the aftermath of the successful crusade. The only contemporary records are a few letters written by Urban in 1095. It is also thought that Urban also may have preached the Crusade at Piacenza, but the only record of which is by Bernold of St. Blasien in his Chronicon.

The five versions of the speech differ widely from one another in regard to particulars, but all versions except that in the Gesta Francorum agree that Urban talked about the violence of European society and the necessity of maintaining the Peace of God; about helping the Greeks, who had asked for assistance; about the crimes being committed against Christians in the east; and about a new kind of war, an armed pilgrimage, and of rewards in heaven, where remission of sins was offered to any who might die in the undertaking. They do not all specifically mention Jerusalem as the ultimate goal. However, it has been argued that Urban's subsequent preaching reveals that he expected the expedition to reach Jerusalem all along. According to one version of the speech, the enthusiastic crowd responded with cries of Deus lo volt!--God wills it.

Peter the Hermit and the People's Crusade

An illustration showing the defeat of the People's Crusade, from Sébastien Mamerot's Livre des Passages d'Outre-mer (Jean Colombe, c. 1472-75, BNF Fr. 5594)

The great French nobles and their trained armies of knights were not the first to undertake the journey towards Jerusalem. Urban had planned the departure of the first crusade for 15 August 1096, the Feast of the Assumption, but months before this, a number of unexpected armies of peasants and petty nobles set off for Jerusalem on their own, led by a charismatic priest called Peter the Hermit. Peter was the most successful of the preachers of Urban's message, and developed an almost hysterical enthusiasm among his followers, although he was probably not an "official" preacher sanctioned by Urban at Clermont. It is commonly believed that Peter's followers consisted entirely of a massive group of untrained and illiterate peasants who did not even know where Jerusalem was, but there were also many knights among the peasants, including Walter Sans Avoir, who was lieutenant to Peter and led a separate army.

Lacking military discipline, in what likely seemed to the participants a strange land ( Eastern Europe), Peter's fledgling army quickly found itself in trouble despite the fact they were still in Christian territory. The army led by Walter fought with the Hungarians over food at Belgrade, but otherwise arrived in Constantinople unharmed. Meanwhile, the army led by Peter, which marched separately from Walter's army, also fought with the Hungarians, and may have captured Belgrade. At Niš, the Byzantine governor tried to supply them, but Peter had little control over his followers and Byzantine troops were needed to quell their attacks. Peter arrived at Constantinople in August, where his army joined with the one led by Walter, which had already arrived, as well as separate bands of crusaders from France, Germany, and Italy. Another army of Bohemians and Saxons did not make it past Hungary before splitting up.

Peter's and Walter's unruly mob began to pillage outside the city in search of supplies and food, prompting Alexios to hurriedly ferry the gathering across the Bosporus one week later. After crossing into Asia Minor, the crusaders split up and began to pillage the countryside, wandering into Seljuk territory around Nicaea. The far more-experienced Turks massacred most of this group. Some Italian and German crusaders were defeated at Xerigordon at the end of August. Meanwhile, Walter and Peter's followers, who, although for the most part untrained in battle but led by about 50 knights, fought the Turks at the Battle of Civetot in October 1096. The Turkish archers destroyed the crusader army, and Walter was among the dead. Peter, who was absent in Constantinople at the time, later joined the second wave of crusaders, along with the few survivors of Civetot.

At a local level, the preaching of the First Crusade ignited the Rhineland massacres perpetrated against Jews. At the end of 1095 and beginning of 1096, months before the departure of the official crusade in August, there were attacks on Jewish communities in France and Germany. In May 1096, Emicho of Flonheim (sometimes incorrectly known as Emicho of Leiningen) attacked the Jews at Speyer and Worms. Other unofficial crusaders from Swabia, led by Hartmann of Dillingen, along with French, English, Lotharingian and Flemish volunteers, led by Drogo of Nesle and William the Carpenter, as well as many locals, joined Emicho in the destruction of the Jewish community of Mainz at the end of May. In Mainz, one Jewish woman killed her children rather than let the crusaders kill them. Chief rabbi Kalonymus Ben Meshullam committed suicide in anticipation of being killed. Emicho's company then went on to Cologne, and others continued on to Trier, Metz, and other cities. Peter the Hermit also may have been involved in violence against the Jews, and an army led by a priest named Folkmar attacked Jews further east in Bohemia.

From Clermont to Constantinople

The four main crusader armies left Europe around the appointed time in August 1096. They took different routes to Constantinople, some through Eastern Europe and the Balkans, some crossing the Adriatic Sea. Coloman of Hungary allowed Godfrey and his troops to cross Hungary only after his brother, Baldwin was offered as a hostage to guarantee his troops' good conduct. They gathered outside the Roman-era Walls of Constantinople between November 1096 and April 1097. Hugh of Vermandois arrived first, followed by Godfrey, Raymond, and Bohemond.

Recruitment

Recruitment for such a large enterprise was continent-wide. Estimates as to the size of the crusader armies have been given as 70,000 to 80,000 on the number who left Western Europe in the year after Clermont, and more joined in the three-year duration. Estimates for the number of knights range from 7,000 to 10,000; 35,000 to 50,000 foot soldiers; and including non-combatants a total of 60,000 to 100,000. But Urban's speech had been well-planned. He had discussed the crusade with Adhemar of Le Puy and Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, and instantly the expedition had the support of two of southern France's most important leaders. Adhemar himself was present at the council and was the first to "take the cross". During the rest of 1095 and into 1096, Urban spread the message throughout France, and urged his bishops and legates to preach in their own dioceses elsewhere in France, Germany, and Italy as well. However, it is clear that the response to the speech was much greater than even the Pope, let alone Alexios, expected. On his tour of France, Urban tried to forbid certain people (including women, monks, and the sick) from joining the crusade, but found this nearly impossible. In the end, most who took up the call were not knights, but peasants who were not wealthy and had little in the way of fighting skills, in an outpouring of a new emotional and personal piety that was not easily harnessed by the ecclesiastical and lay aristocracy. Typically, preaching would conclude with every volunteer taking a vow to complete a pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; they were also given a cross, usually sewn onto their clothes.

It is difficult to assess the motives of the thousands of participants for whom there is no historical record, or even those of important knights, whose stories were usually retold by monks or clerics. It is quite likely that personal piety was a major factor for many crusaders. Even with this popular enthusiasm, Urban was ensured that there would be an army of knights, drawn from the French aristocracy. Aside from Adhemar and Raymond, other leaders he recruited throughout 1096 included Bohemond of Taranto, a southern Italian ally of the reform popes; Bohemond's nephew Tancred; Godfrey of Bouillon, who had previously been an anti-reform ally of the Holy Roman Emperor; his brother Baldwin of Boulogne; Hugh I, Count of Vermandois, brother of the excommunicated Philip I of France; Robert Curthose, brother of William II of England; and his relatives Stephen II, Count of Blois, and Robert II, Count of Flanders. The crusaders represented northern and southern France, Flanders, Germany, and southern Italy, and so were divided into four separate armies that were not always cooperative, though they were held together by their common ultimate goal.

The crusade was led by some of the most powerful nobles of France, many of whom left everything behind, and it was often the case that entire families went on crusade at their own great expense. For example, Robert of Normandy loaned the Duchy of Normandy to his brother William II of England, and Godfrey sold or mortgaged his property to the church. Tancred was worried about the sinful nature of knightly warfare, and was excited to find a holy outlet for violence. Tancred and Bohemond, as well as Godfrey, Baldwin, and their older brother Eustace III, Count of Boulogne, are examples of families who crusaded together. Much of the enthusiasm for the crusade was based on family relations, as most of the French crusaders were distant relatives. Nevertheless, in at least some cases, personal advancement played a role in Crusaders' motives. For instance, Bohemond was motivated by the desire to carve himself out a territory in the east, and had previously campaigned against the Byzantines to try to achieve this. The crusade gave him a further opportunity, which he took after the Siege of Antioch, taking possession of the city and establishing the Principality of Antioch.

The road to Constantinople

The armies travelled to Constantinople by various routes, with Godfrey taking the land route through the Balkans. Raymond of Toulouse led the Provençals down the coast of Illyria, and then due east to Constantinople. Bohemund and Tancred led their Normans by sea to Durazzo, and thence by land to Constantinople. The armies arrived in Constantinople with little food and expected provisions and help from Alexios. Alexios was understandably suspicious after his experiences with the People's Crusade, and also because the knights included his old Norman enemy, Bohemond, who had invaded Byzantine territory on numerous occasions with his father and may have even attempted to organize an attack on Constantinople while encamped outside the city. This time, Alexios was more prepared for the crusaders and there were fewer incidents of violence along the way.

The crusaders may have expected Alexios to become their leader, but he had no interest in joining them, and was mainly concerned with transporting them into Asia Minor as quickly as possible. In return for food and supplies, Alexios requested the leaders to swear fealty to him and promise to return to the Byzantine Empire any land recovered from the Turks. Godfrey was the first to take the oath, and almost all the other leaders followed him, although they did so only after warfare had almost broken out in the city between the citizens and the crusaders, who were eager to pillage for supplies. Raymond alone avoided swearing the oath, instead pledging that he would simply cause no harm to the empire. Before ensuring that the various armies were shuttled across the Bosporus, Alexios advised the leaders on how best to deal with the Seljuk armies that they would soon encounter.

Siege of Nicaea

The Crusader armies crossed over into Asia Minor during the first half of 1097, where they were joined by Peter the Hermit and the remainder of his relatively small army. In addition, Alexios also sent two of his own generals, Manuel Boutoumites and Tatikios, to assist the crusaders. The first objective of their campaign was Nicaea, a city once under Byzantine rule, but which had become the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm under Kilij Arslan. Arslan was away campaigning against the Danishmends in central Anatolia at the time, and had left behind his treasury and his family, underestimating the strength of these new crusaders.

There was some discontent amongst the Franks who were forbidden from looting the city. This was ameliorated by Alexius financially rewarding the crusaders. Later chronicles exaggerate tension between the Greeks and Franks but Stephen of Blois, in a letter to his wife Adela of Blois confirms goodwill and cooperation continued at this point. The fall of Nicaea is viewed as a rare product of close co-operation between the Crusaders and the Byzantines.

Battle of Dorylaeum

At the end of June, the crusaders marched on through Anatolia. They were accompanied by some Byzantine troops under Tatikios, and still harboured the hope that Alexios would send a full Byzantine army after them. They also divided the army into two more-easily managed groups-one contingent led by the Normans, the other by the French. The two groups intended to meet again at Dorylaeum, but on 1 July the Normans, who had marched ahead of the French, were attacked by Kilij Arslan. Arslan had gathered a much larger army than he previously had after his defeat at Nicaea, and now surrounded the Normans with his fast-moving mounted archers. The Normans "deployed in a tight-knit defensive formation", surrounding all their equipment and the non-combatants who had followed them along the journey, and sent for help from the other group. When the French arrived, Godfrey broke through the Turkish lines and the legate Adhemar outflanked the Turks from the rear. The Turks, who had expected to destroy the Normans and did not anticipate the quick arrival of the French, fled rather than face the combined crusader army.

The crusaders' march through Anatolia was thereafter unopposed, but the journey was unpleasant, as Arslan had burned and destroyed everything he left behind in his army's flight. It was the middle of summer, and the crusaders had very little food and water; many men and horses died. Fellow Christians sometimes gave them gifts of food and money, but more often than not, the crusaders simply looted and pillaged whenever the opportunity presented itself. Individual leaders continued to dispute the overall leadership, although none of them were powerful enough to take command on their own, as Adhemar was always recognized as the spiritual leader.

The Armenian interlude

Baldwin of Boulogne entering Edessa in 1098 (history painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, 1840)

After passing through the Cilician Gates, Baldwin and Tancred broke away from the main body of the army and set off towards the Armenian lands. Baldwin desired to create a fiefdom for himself in the Holy Land, and, in Armenia, he could count on the support of the locals, especially an adventurer named Bagrat. Baldwin and Tancred led two separate contingents, departing Heraclea on 15 September. Tancred arrived first at Tarsus where he persuaded the Seljuk garrison to raise his flag on the citadel. Baldwin reached Tarsus the next day and, in a reversal, the Turks allowed Baldwin to take possession of two towers. Heavily outnumbered, Tancred decided not to fight for the town. Shortly thereafter, a group of Norman knights arrived, but Baldwin denied entry to them. The Turks slaughtered the Normans during the night, and Baldwin's men blamed him for their fate and massacred the remaining Seljuk garrison. Baldwin took shelter in a tower and convinced his soldiers of his innocence. A pirate captain, Guynemer of Boulogne, sailed up the Berdan River to Tarsus and swore fealty to Baldwin, who hired Guynemer's men to garrison the city while he continued his campaign.

Tancred had meanwhile seized the town of Mamistra. Baldwin reached the town on around 30 September. The Norman Richard of Salerno wanted to take revenge for Tarsus, causing a skirmish between the soldiers of Baldwin and Tancred. Baldwin left Mamistra and joined the main army at Marash, but Bagrat persuaded him to launch a campaign across a region densely populated by Armenians and he left the main army on 17 October. The Armenians welcomed Baldwin, and the local population massacred the Seljuks, seizing the fortresses Ravendel and Turbessel before the end of 1097. Baldwin made Bagrat the governor of Ravendel.

The Armenian lord Thoros of Edessa sent envoys to Baldwin in early 1098, seeking his assistance against the nearby Seljuks. Before departing for Edessa, Baldwin ordered the arrest of Bagrat, accused of collaboration with the Seljuks. Bagrat was tortured and forced to surrender Ravendel. Baldwin left for Edessa in early February, being harassed en-route by the forces of Balduk, emir of Samosata. Reaching the city, he was well received by both Thoros and the local Christian population. Remarkably, Thoros adopted Baldwin as a son, making him co-regent of Edessa. Strengthened by troops from Edessa, Baldwin raided Balduk's territory and placed a garrison in a small fortress near Samosata.

While the Byzantines had lost Edessa to the Seljuks in 1087, the emperor did not demand that Baldwin hand over the town. Moreover, the acquisition of Ravendel, Turbessel and Edessa strengthened the position of the main crusader army later at Antioch. The lands along the Euphrates secured a supply of food for the crusaders, and the fortresses hindered the movement of the Seljuk troops.

As his force was small, Baldwin had used diplomacy to secure his rule in Edessa. He married Arda of Armenia, who later became queen consort of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and encouraged his retainers to marry local women. The city's rich treasury enabled him to employ mercenaries and to buy Samosata from Balduk. The resultant treaty for the transfer of Samosata was the first friendly arrangement between a crusader leader and a Muslim ruler, who remained governor of the city.

An important figure in the kingdom in the 12th century was Belek Ghazi, grandson of the former Seljuk governor of Jerusalem, Artuk. Belek was to play a small role in this story who, as an Artuqid emir, had hired Baldwin to suppress a revolt in Saruj. When the Muslim leaders of the town approached Balduk to come to their rescue, Balduk hurried to Saruj, but it soon became apparent that his forces were not able to resist a siege and the defenders yielded to Baldwin. Baldwin demanded Balduk's wife and children as hostages, and upon his refusal, Baldwin had him captured and executed. With Saruj, Baldwin now had consolidated the county and ensured his communications with the main body of Crusaders. Kerbogha, ever on guard to defeat the Crusaders, gathered a large army to eliminate Baldwin. During his march towards Antioch, Kerbogha besieged the walls of Edessa for three weeks in May, but could not capture it. This delay played a crucial part in the Crusader victory at Antioch.

Siege of Antioch

Bohemond of Taranto Alone Mounts the Rampart of Antioch, by Gustave Doré (1871)

The crusader army, without Baldwin and Tancred, had marched on to Antioch, situated midway between Constantinople and Jerusalem. Described in a letter by Stephen of Blois as "a city very extensive, fortified with incredible strength and almost impregnable", the idea of taking the city by assault was a discouraging one to the crusaders. Hoping rather to force a capitulation, or find a traitor inside the city-a tactic that had previously seen Antioch change to the control of the Byzantines and then the Seljuk Turks-the crusader army began a siege on 20 October 1097. Antioch was so large that the crusaders did not have enough troops to fully surround it, and as a result it was able to stay partially supplied. The subsequent Siege of Antioch has been called the "most interesting siege in history."

By January the attritional eight-month siege led to hundreds, or possibly thousands, of crusaders dying of starvation. Adhemar believed this to have been caused by their sinful nature, and rituals of fasting, prayer, alms-giving and procession were undertaken. Women were expelled from the camp. Many deserted, including Stephen of Blois. Foraging systems eased the situation, as did supplies from Cicilia and Edessa, through the recently captured ports of Latakia and St Symeon. In March a small English fleet arrived with supplies. The Franks benefited from disunity in the Muslim world and the possibility that they mistakenly believed the crusaders to be Byzantine mercenaries. The Seljuk brothers, Duqaq of Syria and Ridwan of Aleppo, dispatched separate relief armies in December and February that, had they been combined, would probably have been victorious.

After these failures, Kerbogha raised a coalition from southern Syria, northern Iraq and Anatolia with the ambition of extending his power from Syria to the Mediterranean. His coalition first spent three weeks attempting to recapture Saruj, a decisive delay.

Bohemond persuaded the other leaders that, if Antioch fell, he would keep it for himself and that an Armenian commander of a section of the city's walls had agreed to allow the crusaders to enter.

The Armenian Firouz helped Bohemond and a small party enter the city on 2 June and open a gate, at which point horns were sounded, the city's Christian majority opened the other gates and the crusaders entered. In the sack they killed most of the Muslim inhabitants and many Christian Greeks, Syrians and Armenians in the confusion.

On 4 June the vanguard of Kerbogha's 40,000 strong army arrived surrounding the Franks. From 10 June for 4 days waves of Kerbogha's men assailed the city walls from dawn until dusk. Bohemond and Adhemar barred the city gates to prevent mass desertions and managed to hold out. Kerbogha then changed tactics to trying to starve the crusaders out. Morale inside the city was low and defeat looked imminent but a peasant visionary called Peter Bartholomew claimed the apostle St, Andrew came to him to show the location of the Holy Lance that had pierced Christ on the cross. This supposedly encouraged the crusaders but the accounts are misleading as it was two weeks before the final battle for the city. On 24 June the Franks sought terms for surrender that were refused. On 28 June 1098 at dawn the Franks marched out of the city in four battle groups to engage the enemy. Kerbogha allowed them to deploy with the aim of destroying them in the open. However the discipline of the Muslim army did not hold and a disorderly attack was launched. Unable to overrun a bedraggled force they outnumbered two to one Muslims attacking the Bridge Gate fled through the advancing main body of the Muslim army. With very few casualties the Muslim army broke and fled the battle.

Stephen of Blois was in Alexandretta when he learned of the situation in Antioch. It seemed like their situation was hopeless so he left the Middle East, warning Alexios and his army on his way back to France. Because of what looked like a massive betrayal, the leaders at Antioch, most notably Bohemond, argued that Alexios had deserted the Crusade and thus invalidated all of their oaths to him. While Bohemond asserted his claim to Antioch, not everyone agreed (most notably Raymond of Toulouse), so the crusade was delayed for the rest of the year while the nobles argued amongst themselves. When discussing this period, a common historiographical viewpoint advanced by some scholars is that the Franks of northern France, the Provençals of southern France, and the Normans of southern Italy considered themselves separate nations, creating turmoil as each tried to increase its individual status. Others argue that while this may have had something to do with the disputes, personal ambition among the Crusader leaders might be just as easily blamed.

Meanwhile, a plague broke out, killing many among the army, including the legate Adhemar, who died on 1 August. There were now even fewer horses than before, and worse, the Muslim peasants in the area refused to supply the crusaders with food. Thus, in December, following the Siege of Ma'arrat al-Numan, some historians described the first occurrence of cannibalism among the crusaders, even though this account does not appear in any contemporary Muslim chronicle. At the same time, the minor knights and soldiers had become increasingly restless and threatened to continue to Jerusalem without their squabbling leaders. Finally, at the beginning of 1099, the march restarted, leaving Bohemond behind as the first Prince of Antioch.

From Antioch to Jerusalem

Proceeding down the Mediterranean coast, the crusaders encountered little resistance, as local rulers preferred to make peace with them and furnish them with supplies rather than fight. Their forces were evolving, with Robert Curthose and Tancred agreed to become vassals of Raymond IV of Toulouse, who was wealthy enough to compensate them for their service. Godfrey of Bouillon, now supported by his brother's territories in Edessa, refused to do the same. In January, Raymond dismantled the walls of Ma'arrat al-Numan, and he began the march south to Jerusalem, barefoot and dressed as a pilgrim, followed by Robert and Tancred and their respective armies.

Raymond planned to take Tripoli to set up a state equivalent to Antioch, but first initiated a siege of Arqa, a city in northern Lebanon, on 14 February 1099. Meanwhile, Godfrey, along with Robert II of Flanders, who had also refused vassalage to Raymond, joined with the remaining Crusaders at Latakia and marched south in February. Bohemond had originally marched out with them but quickly returned to Antioch in order to consolidate his rule against the advancing Byzantines. Tancred left Raymond's service and joined with Godfrey. A separate force linked to Godfrey's was led by Gaston IV of Béarn.

Godfrey, Robert, Tancred, and Gaston arrived at Arqa in March, but the siege continued. Pons of Balazun died, struck by a stone missile. The situation was tense not only among the military leaders, but also among the clergy. Since Adhemar's death there had been no real leader of the crusade, and ever since the discovery of the Holy Lance, there had been accusations of fraud among the clerical factions. On 8 April, Arnulf of Chocques challenged Peter Bartholomew to an ordeal by fire. Peter underwent the ordeal and died after days of agony from his wounds, which discredited the Holy Lance as a fake. This also undermined Raymond's authority over the Crusade, as he was the main proponent of its authenticity.

The siege of Arqa lasted until 13 May, when the Crusaders left having captured nothing. The Fatimids had recaptured Jerusalem from the Seljuks the year before and attempted to make a deal with the Crusaders, promising freedom of passage to any pilgrims to the Holy Land on the condition that the Crusaders not advance into their domains, but this was rejected. The Fatimid Iftikhar al-Dawla was governor of Jerusalem and well aware of the Crusaders' intentions. Therefore, he expelled all of Jerusalem's Christian inhabitants. He also poisoned most of the wells in the area. On 13 May, the Crusaders came to Tripoli, where the emir Jalal al-Mulk Abu'l Hasan provided the crusader army with horses and vowed to convert to Christianity if the Crusaders defeated the Fatimids. Continuing south along the coast, the Crusaders passed Beirut on 19 May and Tyre on 23 May. Turning inland at Jaffa, on 3 June they reached Ramla, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants. The bishopric of Ramla-Lydda was established there at the Church of St. George before they continued on to Jerusalem. On 6 June, Godfrey sent Tancred and Gaston to capture Bethlehem, where Tancred flew his banner over the Church of the Nativity. On 7 June, the Crusaders reached Jerusalem. Many Crusaders wept upon seeing the city they had journeyed so long to reach.

Siege of Jerusalem

The Siege of Jerusalem as depicted in a medieval manuscript

The Crusaders' arrival at Jerusalem revealed an arid countryside, lacking in water or food supplies. Here there was no prospect of relief, even as they feared an imminent attack by the local Fatimid rulers. There was no hope of trying to blockade the city as they had at Antioch; the crusaders had insufficient troops, supplies, and time. Rather, they resolved to take the city by assault. They might have been left with little choice, as by the time the Crusader army reached Jerusalem, it has been estimated that only about 12,000 men including 1,500 cavalry remained. Thus began the decisive Siege of Jerusalem. These contingents, composed of men with differing origins and varying allegiances, were also approaching another low ebb in their camaraderie. While Godfrey and Tancred made camp to the north of the city, Raymond made his to the south. In addition, the Provençal contingent did not take part in the initial assault on 13 June 1099. This first assault was perhaps more speculative than determined, and after scaling the outer wall the Crusaders were repulsed from the inner one.

After the failure of the initial assault, a meeting between the various leaders was organized in which it was agreed upon that a more concerted attack would be required in the future. On 17 June, a party of Genoese mariners under Guglielmo Embriaco arrived at Jaffa, and provided the Crusaders with skilled engineers, and perhaps more critically, supplies of timber (stripped from the ships) to build siege engines. The Crusaders' morale was raised when the priest Peter Desiderius claimed to have had a divine vision of Adhemar of Le Puy, instructing them to fast and then march in a barefoot procession around the city walls, after which the city would fall, following the Biblical story of the battle of Jericho. After a three-day fast, on 8 July the Crusaders performed the procession as they had been instructed by Desiderius, ending on the Mount of Olives where Peter the Hermit preached to them, and shortly afterward the various bickering factions arrived at a public rapprochement. News arrived shortly after that a Fatimid relief army had set off from Egypt, giving the Crusaders a very strong incentive to make another assault on the city.

The final assault on Jerusalem began on 13 July. Raymond's troops attacked the south gate while the other contingents attacked the northern wall. Initially the Provençals at the southern gate made little headway, but the contingents at the northern wall fared better, with a slow but steady attrition of the defence. On 15 July, a final push was launched at both ends of the city, and eventually the inner rampart of the northern wall was captured. In the ensuing panic, the defenders abandoned the walls of the city at both ends, allowing the Crusaders to finally enter.

The massacre that followed the capture of Jerusalem has attained particular notoriety, as a "juxtaposition of extreme violence and anguished faith". The eyewitness accounts from the crusaders themselves leave little doubt that there was great slaughter in the aftermath of the siege. Nevertheless, some historians propose that the scale of the massacre has been exaggerated in later medieval sources.

After the successful assault on the northern wall, the defenders fled to the Temple Mount, pursued by Tancred and his men. Arriving before the defenders could secure the area, Tancred's men assaulted the precinct, butchering many of the defenders, with the remainder taking refuge in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Tancred then called a halt to the slaughter, offering those in the mosque his protection. When the defenders on the southern wall heard of the fall of the northern wall, they fled to the citadel, allowing Raymond and the Provençals to enter the city. Iftikhar al-Dawla, the commander of the garrison, struck a deal with Raymond, surrendering the citadel in return for being granted safe passage to Ascalon.

The slaughter continued for the rest of the day; Muslims were indiscriminately killed, and Jews who had taken refuge in their synagogue died when it was burnt down by the Crusaders. The following day, Tancred's prisoners in the mosque were slaughtered. Nevertheless, it is clear that some Muslims and Jews of the city survived the massacre, either escaping or being taken prisoner to be ransomed. The Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon provides details of Ascalon Jews making great efforts to ransom such Jewish captives and send them to safety in Alexandria. The Eastern Christian population of the city had been expelled before the siege by the governor, and thus escaped the massacre.

Establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem

Crusader graffiti in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

On 22 July, a council was held in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to establish governance for Jerusalem. The death of the Greek Patriarch meant there was no obvious ecclesiastical candidate to establish a religious lordship, as a body of opinion maintained. Although Raymond of Toulouse could claim to be the pre-eminent crusade leader from 1098 his support had waned since his failed attempts to besiege Arqa and create his own realm. This may have been why he piously refused the crown on the grounds that it could only be worn by Christ. It may also have been an attempt to persuade others to reject the title, but Godfrey was already familiar with such a position. Probably more persuasive was the presence of the large army from Lorraine, led by him and his brothers, Eustace and Baldwin, vassals of the Ardennes-Bouillion dynasty. Godfrey was then elected leader, accepting the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri or Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. Raymond, incensed at this development, attempted to seize the Tower of David before leaving the city.

While the Kingdom of Jerusalem would remain until 1291, the city of Jerusalem would be lost to the Muslims under Saladin in 1187, a result of the decisive Battle of Hattin. The history of Jerusalem would record Muslim rule for 40 years, returning finally to Christian control following a series of later Crusades.

Battle of Ascalon

In August 1099, Fatimid vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah landed a force of 20,000 North Africans at Ascalon. Geoffrey and Raymond marched out to meet this force on 9 August with a force of only 1,200 knights and 9,000 foot soldiers. Outnumbered two to one, the Franks launched a surprise dawn attack and routed the overconfident and unprepared Muslim force. The opportunity was wasted though, as squabbling between Raymond and Godfrey prevented an attempt by the city's garrison to surrender to the more trusted Raymond. The crusaders had won a decisive victory, but the city remained in Muslim hands and a military threat to the nascent kingdom.

Aftermath and legacy

The Crusader states between the First and Second Crusades

The majority of crusaders now considered their pilgrimage complete and returned home. Only 300 knights and 2,000 infantry remained to defend Palestine. It was the support of the knights from Lorraine that enabled Godfrey to take leadership of Jerusalem, over the claims of Raymond. When he died a year later these same Lorrainers thwarted papal legate Dagobert of Pisa and his plans to make Jerusalem a theocracy and instead made Baldwin the first Latin king of Jerusalem. Bohemond returned to Europe to fight the Byzantines from Italy but he was defeated in 1108 at Dyrrhachium. After Raymond's death, his heirs captured Tripoli in 1109 with Genoese support. Relations between the newly created Crusader states of the County of Edessa and Principality of Antioch were variable. They fought together in the crusader defeat at the Battle of Harran in 1104, but the Antiocheans claimed suzerainty and blocked the return of Baldwin II of Jerusalem after his capture at the battle. The Franks became fully engaged in Near East politics with the result that Muslims and Christians often fought each other. Antioch's territorial expansion ended in 1119 with a major defeat to the Turks at the Battle of Ager Sanguinis, the Field of Blood.

A map of western Anatolia showing the routes taken by Christian armies during the Crusade of 1101

There were many who had gone home before reaching Jerusalem, and many who had never left Europe at all. When the success of the Crusade became known, these people were mocked and scorned by their families and threatened with excommunication by the pope. Back at home in Western Europe, those who had survived to reach Jerusalem were treated as heroes. Robert II of Flanders was nicknamed Hierosolymitanus thanks to his exploits. Among the participants in the later Crusade of 1101 were Stephen of Blois, and Hugh of Vermandois, both of whom had returned home before reaching Jerusalem. This crusader force was almost annihilated in Asia Minor by the Seljuks, but the survivors helped to reinforce the kingdom upon their arrival in Jerusalem.

There is limited written evidence of the Islamic reaction dating from before 1160, but what there is indicates the crusade was barely noticed. This may be the result of a cultural misunderstanding in that the Turks and Arabs did not recognise the crusaders as religiously motivated warriors seeking conquest and settlement, assuming that the crusaders were just the latest in a long line of Byzantine mercenaries. Also, the Islamic world remained divided among rival rulers in Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad. There was no pan-Islamic counter-attack, giving the crusaders the opportunity to consolidate.

Historiography

Latin Christendom was amazed by the success of the First Crusade for which the only credible explanation was divine providence. If the crusade had failed it is likely that the paradigm of crusading would have been abandoned. Instead, this form of religious warfare was popular for centuries and the crusade itself became one of the most written-about historic events of the medieval period. The historiography (history of the histories) of the First Crusade and the Crusades in general, as expected, show works that reflect the views of the authors and the times that they lived in. Critical analyses of these works can be found in studies by Jonathan Riley-Smith and Christopher Tyerman.

Original sources

The 19th-century French work Recueil des historiens des croisades (RHC) documents the original narrative sources of the First Crusade from Latin, Arabic, Greek, Armenian and Syriac authors. The documents are presented in their original language with French translations. The work built on the 17th century work Gesta Dei per Francos, compiled by Jacques Bongars. Several Hebrew sources on the First Crusade also exist. A complete bibliography can be found in The Routledge Companion to the Crusades. See also Crusade Texts in Translation and Selected Sources: The Crusades, in Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook.

Gesta Francorum - Liber VI (Battle outside Antioch) in Latin with English subtitles

The Latin narrative sources for the First Crusade are: (1) the anonymous Gesta Francorum; (2) Peter Tudebode's Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere; (3) the Monte Cassino chronicle Historia belli sacri; (4) Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem by Raymond of Aguilers; (5) Gesta Francorum Iherusalem Perefrinantium by Fulcher of Chartres; (6) Albert of Aachen's Historia Hierosolymitanae expeditionis; (7) Ekkehard of Aura's Hierosolymita; (8) Robert the Monk's Historia Hierosolymitana; (9) Baldric of Dol's Historiae Hierosolymitanae libri IV; (10) Radulph of Caen's Gesta Tancredi in expeditione Hierosolymitana; and (11) Dei gesta per Francos by Guibert of Nogent. These include multiple first-hand accounts of the Council of Clermont and the crusade itself. American historian August Krey has created a narrative The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, verbatim from the various chronologies and letters which offers considerable insight into the endeavor.

Important related works include the Greek perspective offered in the by Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, daughter of the emperor. The view of the Crusades from the Islamic perspective is found in two major sources. The first, The Chronicle of Damascus, is by Arab historian Ibn al-Qalanisi. The second is The Complete History ( Kamil fi at-Tarikh) by the Arab (or Kurdish) historian Ali ibn al-Athir. Minor but important works from the Armenian and Syriac are Matthew of Edessa's Chronicle and the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian. The three Hebrew chronicles include the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle discussing the Rhineland massacres. A complete description of sources of the First Crusade is found in Claude Cahen's La Syrie du nord à l'époque des croisades et la principauté franque d'Antioche.

The anonymous author of the Gesta, Fulcher of Chartres and Raymond of Aguilers were all participants in the Crusade, accompanied different contingents, and their works are regarded as foundational. Fulcher and Raymond both utilized Gesta to some extent, as did Peter Tudebode and the Historia Belli Sacri, with some variations. The Gesta was reworked (some with other eyewitness accounts) by Guibert of Nogent, Baldric of Dol, and Robert the Monk, whose work was the most widely read. Albert's account appears to be written independently of the Gesta, relying on other eyewitness reports. Derivative accounts of the Crusade include Bartolf of Nangis' Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnatium, Henry of Huntingdon's De Captione Antiochiae, Sigebert of Gembloux's Chronicon sive Chronographia, and Benedetto Accolti's De Bello a Christianis contra Barbaros.

The first known mention of the Frankish conquest of Jerusalem, in an Armenian colophon written in 1099[135]

A 19th-century perspective of these works can be found in Heinrich von Sybel's History and Literature of the Crusades. Von Sybel also discusses some of the more important letters and correspondence from the First Crusade that provide some historical insight. See also the works Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren, 1088-1100, by Heinrich Hagenmeyer and Letters of the Crusaders, by Dana Carleton Munro. Hagenmeyer also prepared the Chronologie de la première croisade 1094-1100, a day-by-day account of the First Crusade, cross-referenced to original sources, with commentary.

Later works through the 18th century

The popularity of these works shaped how crusading was viewed in the medieval mind. Numerous poems and songs sprung from the First Crusade, including Gilo of Toucy's Historia de via Hierosolymitana. The well-known chanson de geste, Chanson d'Antioche, describes the First Crusade from the original preaching through the taking of Antioch in 1098 and into 1099. Based on Robert's work, Chanson d'Antioche was a valuable resource in helping catalog participants in the early Crusades and shaped how crusading was viewed in the medieval mind. A later poem was Torquato Tasso's 16th century Gerusalemme liberata, was based on Accolti's work and popular for nearly two centuries. Tasso's work was converted into the biography Godfrey of Bulloigne, or, The recoverie of Jerusalem, by Edward Fairfax.

Later histories include English chronicler Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastica. The work was a general social history of medieval England that includes a section on the First Crusade based on Baldric's account, with added details from oral sources and biographical details. The Gesta and the more detailed account of Albert of Aachen were used as the basis of the work of William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum and its extensions. The archbishop of Tyre's work was a major primary source for the history of the First Crusade and is regarded as their first analytical history. Later histories, through the 17th century, relied heavily on his writings. These histories used primary source materials, but they used them selectively to talk of Holy War ( bellum sacrum), and their emphasis was upon prominent individuals and upon battles and the intrigues of high politics.

Other works included by Bongars are Historia Hierosolymitana written by theologian and historian Jacques de Vitry, a participant in a later crusade; Historia by Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, an account of Godfrey of Bouillon's arrival in Constantinople in 1096; and Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis by Venetian statesman and geographer Marino Sanuto, whose work on geography was invaluable to later historians. The first biography of Godfrey of Bouillon, Historia et Gesta Ducis Gotfridi seu historia de desidione Terræ sanctæ, was written by anonymous German authors in 1141, relying on the original narratives and later histories, and appears in the RHC.

The first use of the term crusades was by 17th century French Jesuit and historian Louis Maimbourg in his Histoire des Croisades pour la délivrance de la Terre Sainte, a populist and royalist history of the Crusades from 1195 to 1220. An earlier work by Thomas Fuller, The Historie of the Holy Warre refers to the entire enterprise as the Holy War, with individual campaigns called voyages. Fuller's account was more anecdotal than historical, and was very popular until the Restoration. The work used original sources from Gesta Dei per Francos, and includes a chronology that is surprisingly complete for such an early work.

Notable works of the 18th century include Histoire des Croisades, a history of the Crusades from the rise of the Seljuks until 1195 by French philosopher Voltaire. Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume did not write directly of the First Crusade, but his The History of England described the Crusades as the "nadir of Western civilization." This view was continued by Edward Gibbon in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, excerpted as The Crusades, A.D. 1095-1261. This edition also includes an essay on chivalry by Sir Walter Scott, whose works helped popularize the Crusades.

The 19th and 20th centuries

Early in the 19th century, the monumental Histoire des Croisades was published by the French historian Joseph François Michaud. under the editorship of Jean Poujoulat. This provided a major new narrative based on original sources and was translated into English as The History of the Crusades. The work covers the First Crusade and its causes, and the crusades through 1481. French historian Jean-François-Aimé Peyré expanded Michaud's work on the First Crusade with his Histoire de la Première Croisade, a 900-page, two-volume set with extensive sourcing.

The English school of Crusader historians included Charles Mills who wrote History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land, a complete history of nine Crusades, disparaging Gibbon's work as superficial. Henry Stebbings wrote his History of Chivalry and the Crusades, a discussion of chivalry and history of the first seven Crusades. Thomas Archer and Charles Kingsford wrote The Crusades: The Story of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, rejecting the idea that the Fourth Crusade and the Albigensian Crusade should be designated as crusades.

The German school of Crusaders was led by Friederich Wilken, whose Geschichte der Kreuzzüge was a complete history of the Crusades, based on Western, Arabic, Greek and Armenian sources. Later, Heinrich von Sybel, who studied under Leopold von Ranke (the father of modern source-based history) challenged the work of William of Tyre as being secondary. His Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges was a history of the First Crusade and contains a full study of the authorities for the First Crusade, and was translated to History and Literature of the Crusades by English author Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon.

The greatest German historian of the Crusades was then Reinhold Röhricht. His histories of the First Crusade, Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges, and of the kings of Jerusalem, Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, laid the foundation of all modern crusade research. His Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae summarizes over 3500 books on the geography of the Holy Land, providing a valuable resource for historians. Röhricht's colleague Heinrich Hagenmeyer wrote Peter der Eremite, a critical contribution to the history of the First Crusade and the role of Peter the Hermit.

Two encyclopedia articles appeared in the early 20th century that are frequently called out by Crusader historians. The first of these is Crusades, by French historian Louis R. Bréhier, appearing in the Catholic Encyclopedia, based on his L'Église et l'Orient au Moyen Âge: Les Croisades. The second is The Crusades, by English historian Ernest Barker, in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition). Collectively, Bréhier and Barker wrote more than 50 articles for these two publications. Barker's work was later revised as and Bréhier published Histoire anonyme de la première croisade. According to the Routledge Companion, these articles are evidence that "not all old things are useless."

According to the Routledge Companion, the three works that rank as being monumental by 20th century standards are: René Grousset's Histoire des croisades et du royaume franc de Jérusalem; Steven Runciman's 3-volume set of A History of the Crusades, and the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades (Wisconsin History). Grousset's volume on the First Crusade was L'anarchie musulmane, a standard reference in the mid-twentieth century. The next two are still enjoying widespread use today. Runciman's first volume The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem has been criticized for being out-of-date and biased, but remains one of the most widely read accounts of the crusade. The first volume of the Wisconsin History, Volume 1: The First One Hundred Years, first appeared in 1969 and was edited by Marshall W. Baldwin. The chapters on the First Crusade were written by Runciman and Frederic Duncalf and again are dated, but still well-used references. Additional background chapters on related events of the 11th century are: Western Europe, by Sidney Painter; the Byzantine Empire, by Peter Charanis; the Islamic world by H. A. B. Gibb; the Seljuk invasion, by Claude Cahen; and the Assassins, by Bernard Lewis.

Bibliographies of works on the First Crusade through the 20th century include ones by French medievalist and Byzantinist Ferdinand Chalandon in his Histoire de la Première Croisade jusqu'à l'élection de Godefroi de Bouillon and the Select Bibliography on the Crusades, compiled by Hans E. Mayer and Joyce McLellan.

Modern histories of the First Crusade

Since the 1970s, the Crusades have attracted hundreds of scholars to their study, many of which are identified in the on-line database Historians of the Crusades, part of the Resources for Studying the Crusades created at Queen Mary University of London in 2007-2008. Some of the more notable historians of the First Crusade include Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938-2016), the leading historian of the Crusades of his generation. His work includes The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1993) and The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (1998). His doctoral students are among the most renowned in the world and he led the team that created the Database of Crusaders to the Holy Land, 1096-1149. Carole Hillenbrand (born 1943) is an Islamic scholar whose work The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) discusses themes that highlight how Muslims reacted to the presence of the Crusaders in the heart of traditionally Islamic territory and is regarded as one of the most influential works on the First Crusade. Other current researchers include Christopher Tyerman (born 1953) whose God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2006) is regarded as the definitive account of all the crusades. In his An Eyewitness History of the Crusades (2004), Tyerman provides the history of the crusades told from original eyewitness sources, both Christian and Muslim. Thomas Asbridge (born 1969) has written The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam (2004) and the more expansive The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (2012). Thomas Madden (born 1960) has written The New Concise History of the Crusades (2005) and The Real History of the Crusades (2011). The Crusades-An Encyclopedia (2006) edited by historian Alan V. Murray provides comprehensive treatment of the Crusades with over 1000 entries written by 120 authors from 25 countries. The list of other historians is extensive and excellent bibliographies include that by Asbridge and in The Routledge Companion to the Crusades.

References

1. ^ Painter, Sidney (1969). "Western Europe on the Eve of the Crusades". In Setton, K., A History of the Crusades: Volume I. pp. 3-30.

2. ^ Gibb, Hamilton A. R. (1969). "The Caliphate and the Arab States". In Setton, K., A History of the Crusades: Volume I. pp. 81-98.

3. ^ Maier, Christoph T. "Papal letters". The Crusades - An Encyclopedia. pp. 931-932.

4. ^ Munro, Dana Carleton. (1906). The speech of Pope Urban II. at Clermont, 1095. Reprinted from the American Historical Review. New York.

5. Murray, Alan V. (2006)."People's Crusades (1096)". In The Crusades - An Encyclopedia. pp. 939-941.

6. ^ Louis René Bréhier (1911). "Peter the Hermit". In Catholic Encyclopedia. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

7. Runciman, S. (1949). The First Crusaders' Journey across the Balkan Peninsula. Byzantion, 19, 207-221.

8. ^ Appendix II: The Numerical Strength of the Crusaders. In Runciman, Steven (1951), A History of the Crusades, Volume One. pp. 336-341.

9. ^ Kedar, Benjamin Z. (2004). The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099. In Crusades: Volume 3. pp. 15-76.

10. ^ Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook. "Selected Sources - The Crusades". Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Fordham University.

11. ^ Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (2001) The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World Dumbarton Oaks.

12. ^ Löffler, Klemens (1912). "Sigebert of Gembloux" . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

13. ^ Robert W. Thomson. "The Crusaders through Armenian Eyes", in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World. Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh. Dumbarton Oaks, 2001. pp. 72-73.

14. Sybel, H. von (1861). Literature of the Crusades. In The history and literature of the crusades. London. pp. 99-272.

15. ^ Edgington, Susan B. "Chanson d'Antioch". The Crusades - An Encyclopedia. pp. 235-236.

16. ^ Lock, Peter (2006). Routledge, Abingdon. "The Routledge Companion to the Crusades". p. 257.

17. Lock, Peter (2006). Routledge, Abingdon. "The Routledge Companion to the Crusades". pp. 268-269.

18. ^ Louis René Bréhier (1868-1951) (1913). In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

19. ^ Baldwin, M. W. (1969). The History of the Crusades, Volume 1 (1969). "The First One Hundred Years".

20. ^ Mayer, H. E., and McLellan, J. (1989). In Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe. "Select bibliography of the Crusades" (PDF).

Bibliography

Edgington, Susan B. (2019). Baldwin I of Jerusalem, 1100-1118. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1317176404.

Hagenmeyer, Heinrich (1902). Chronologie de la première croisade 1094-1100. E. Leroux, Paris.

Jotischky, Andrew (2004). Crusading and the Crusader States. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-582-41851-6.

Lock, Peter (2006). Routledge Companion to the Crusades. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203389638. ISBN 0-415-39312-4.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan (1991). The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. University of Pennsylvania. ISBN 0-8122-1363-7.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan (1998). The First Crusaders, 1095-1131. Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-64603-0.

Runciman, Steven (1992). The First Crusade. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521232555.

Yewdale, Ralph Bailey (1917). Bohemond I, Prince of Antioch. Princeton University.

External links

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The First Crusade (1096-1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic rule.