Religious people often like to make the claim that without religion there would be no morality. Such a claim does not address the problem of why, if it is true, that there can be so many religious people who are immoral. Take the Spanish Inquisition, for example. As a bureaucratic arm of the Catholic Church, surviving a span of time from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars, they engaged in such crimes and human rights violations as torture, mass murder, extortion, blackmail, ethnic cleansing, and sexual abuse. If they had truly been the moral arbiters of the Spanish Kingdom, they would not have so freely indulged in such atrocities that make your average organized crime family look like a gang of saints. In fact you wouldn’t be wrong to compare the Inquisition to the Nazis for a long list of reasons, rabid anti-Semitism being one of them. Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition does a sufficient job of showing just how immoral that political organization really was while analyzing the mechanisms of their practices and motivations, further condemning them as yet another corrupt and vicious criminal element of human history.
This nicely bound impression is actually a facsimile edition of three different books written by Jean Plaidy, a woman who more famously found success as an author of historical romance novels under the pen name Victoria Holt. The first part examines the precursors, origins, and rise of the Spanish Inquisition. She begins with a spasm of righteous anger directed towards the sadists who ran this institution. From her own Christian point of view, she accuses them of ignoring their own religious doctrines for the sake of maintaining their own power and control over Spanish society. Plaidy further examines the first medieval Papal Inquisitions that took place across Europe. From there she details the practices and methods of the Inquisitors, how they used torture as a method of extracting false confessions from so-called heretics, then later to publicly humiliate them and burn them at the stake in public spectacles called autos de fe. They Inquisition dominated Spanish society, ruling them by fear, and enforcing strict conformity of thought, speech, and action. In its details and narrative, this fist section is the best and most informative part of this book.
The second section is of mixed value. On one hand, it gives a strong explanation of how King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella used the Inquisition to help them consolidate and solidify the Spanish Kingdom. Led by the bigoted and sadistic Primate Torquemada, they persecuted minority populations to ensure the uniformity of the Spanish populace. They first went after the most marginalized citizens, Jewish converts to Christianity, and punished them for allegedly practicing Judaism clandestinely after being baptized into the Catholic faith. Soon after, the Inquisition went after Jews who did not convert and the Islamic Moors who also insisted on maintaining their own traditions. Sadly, both groups of people were either forced to convert, chased out of the country, or executed en masse. Unfortunately for the Spanish Kingdom, these wars and ethnic cleansings resulted in an economic crash because all the farmers and merchants were quickly eliminated from society without being replaced. Conservatives of our day who support an anti-pluralistic agenda might want to look at a past example like this to see a possible consequence of such a political program. Cultural diversity often leads to more stable societies rather than the other way around.
On the other hand, this second section of the book goes into a lot of detail about the political intrigues and affairs of Ferdinand and Isabella and their sidekick Ximenes, the man who replaced Torquemada when he died. These passages are not poorly written or even uninteresting, but Plaidy strays too far away from the subject of the Spanish Inquisition to make them relevant to the overall subject matter of the book.
The third part is the weakest. There is a lot about the Spanish monarchy and the succession of kings and queens that came after Ferdinand and Isabella. Again, a lot of this is not directly relevant to the Inquisition. There are, however, a lot of anecdotal stories about the corruption and the wrongdoings of that most hated institution. There are some stories about the Inquisition’s weak attempts at spreading abroad and into the Spanish colonies too. But after a while, these passages read more like lists of terrible things the Inquisition did and less like an interesting engagement with history.
Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition gets off to a very strong start but dwindles into chore-like writing by the end. Still, it is a strong and solid analytical work of history that serves as a good overview of this shameful but fascinating sector of Europe, bridging the medieval with the early modern world. By extension, it is easy to see how this piece fits into the puzzle of 20th century atrocities, totalitarian regimes, the World Wars, nationalist movements, and the modernist revolt in favor of the individual’s liberation. And as for the religious question, you may be left wondering how religion could be the foundation of morality when it seems, rather, that it has so often been the cause of immorality, cruelty, and corruption more than anything else. The Spanish Inquisition is just one of a multitude of examples supporting the latter side of that ethical equation. If anything, the Spanish Inquisition demonstrates why the separation of church and state became such an important idea for the Founding Fathers of America and why history is needed to remind us of this.
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