And yes hundreds of thousands ByzCath, most estimates are somewhere in the 150,000 to 400,000 margin of people expelled from Spain during the Inquistion. Not counting the thousands more tortured and killed.
“Most estimates” are wrong. And something you may not understand is the unity between Church and State at those time. Heretical conduct was tantamount to treason.
From an article by Anne Carroll:
The Inquisition
…[Isabella] set about reforming the Church, raising the educational and moral standards of the clergy. **Many abuses were halted, including the practice of selling indulgences, which would cause much grief in the rest of Europe. **
One of the most serious problems the Church faced was the **number of Jews and Moors who had been baptized Catholics and risen to high positions in the government and the Church without really believing in Christian doctrine. **These false Conversos and Moriscos (converted Jews and Moors) were a threat to the Church and to Spain, and
a way had to be found of determining who was a true Christian and loyal Spaniard and who was a traitor. Isabel knew that not all the Conversos and Moriscos were enemies — her own confessor was a Converso as was the husband of her best friend. But to protect the innocent, the guilty had to be found.
…At the beginning of the Inquisition, there were many abuses — some innocent people suffered and torture was used frequently. At this point the Pope stepped in and appointed new Inquisitors, with the Grand Inquisitor (head of the Inquisition) being a Dominican monk named Tomas de Torquemada. Torquemada reformed the procedure of the Inquisition to ensure that justice would he done. He made its procedures more lenient and improved conditions in the prisons. He personally examined appeals from the accused and gave money to help the families of those on trial.
…
**One criticism is that the Inquisition used torture. It did, though less so under Torquemada than before him. Torture is wrong, and the Church has since condemned any use of torture. But at the time, all governments routinely used torture as a means of extracting confessions. **the Inquisitors were most probably acting in good faith, and they should not be singled out as unusually evil.
A second attack is that the Inquisition’s judgments led to the execution of the guilty. People in modern times consider it wrong to execute people for not truly believing in the religion they professed, but that is not in fact why they were executed.
Those found guilty were traitors to the state and to the Church, and treason has almost always been recognized as a crime justifying capital punishment. Furthermore, those found guilty were always given a chance to repent. Only if they refused to repent or if they relapsed into their crimes after promising repentance were they executed. Finally, only 2,000 were executed, a small percentage of the 100,000 put on trial. **
A final charge is that the method of execution, burning at the stake, was unusually barbaric. But the 16th century was a brutal time. In England capital punishment consisted of being hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled, and then cut into four pieces (hanged, drawn and quartered); in France, it was to be boiled alive.** Again, Spain should not be singled out for condemnation.
The Inquisition, in fact, though not perfect, was a more just court than most. **Often, people charged with regular crimes would pretend to be heretics so that they could be transferred to the custody of the Inquisition, whose prisoners were better treated. **
Looking at the Inquisition historically, we see that it
avoided more deaths than it caused. Because Spain was united religiously as well as politically, it did not suffer the religious wars which came when Protestantism began in other countries. Furthermore, **a few years later other parts of Europe went through a witchcraft hysteria, when many people were executed as witches on only the flimsiest of evidence, or no evidence at all (30,000 in England, 100,000 in Germany). In Spain, the Inquisition investigated charges of witchcraft and found them baseless, thus saving many innocent people from death. **
All the efforts of Ferdinand and lsabel —
ending civil war, restoring order and justice, completing the Reconquista, reforming the Church — brought peace and prosperity to Spain. The latter years of their reign and the **years immediately following are known as Spain’s Golden Age, when art, literature, culture and science reached a high point. During the 16th century, Spain was the intellectual capital of the world, with scholars coming from all over Europe to study there. **
