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Inquisition
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Perhaps the most famous individual victim of the Inquisition was the “Maid of Orleans” – Joan of Arc. Joan was born in Domremy, France in 1412. From age 13 onwards, she had a series of visions from the Archangel Michael, and the Saints Catherine and Margaret. In 1429, believing that she had received instructions to liberate France from the English, she rode 300 miles through enemy territory to see the dauphin, Charles VII. Eventually, Charles, convinced that her powers did indeed come from heaven, put Joan in charge of his army.
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Among the innumerable victims of the Inquisition were such famous people as the philosopher Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Joan of Arc, and the religious order of knights called the Templars. The institution and its excesses have been an embarrassment to many modern Christians. In anti-Catholic and antireligious polemics since the Enlightenment (for example, Voltaire's Candide), the Inquisition has been cited as a prime example of what is thought to be the barbarism of the Middle Ages. In its day there was some popular sympathy for the Inquisition. Some saw it as a political and economic tool, others, as a necessary defense for religious belief. Nevertheless, despite all efforts at understanding the institution in the light of social, political, religious, and ideological factors, today the Inquisition is generally admitted to belong to the darker side of Christian history.
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The Inquisition, as an ecclesiastical tribunal, had jurisdiction only over baptized Christians. However, since Jews (in 1492) and Muslim Moors (in 1502) had been banished from Spain, jurisdiction of the Inquisition during a large part of its history extended in practice to all royal subjects. The Inquisition worked in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of recent converts.
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You’re not allowed in any field that the Inquisition has declared off-limits. And that goes for anyone else’s scientific work. If, for instance, someone like real scientist Rupert Sheldrake writes a book (A New Science of Life) about morphogenetic fields in biology, you have to go along with the Grand Inquisitor—in this case, the editor of a prestigious science magazine—who suggests that the book be burned. On the other hand, if any darling of the Grand Inquisitor babbles vacuously for several hundred pages, you must praise the book to the skies.
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The Inquisition's formative phase lasted until 1517. A well-defined institutional structure took shape. At the top were the inquisitor general (... called the grand inquisitor; the first was Friar Tomás de Torquemada [1420–1498]) and the royal council, known as La Suprema. Several permanent tribunals emerged at this time, while others functioned briefly and then disappeared. During the formative years the tribunals focused almost exclusively on Judaizers. The limited evidence that survives from this period suggests that perhaps as many as 15,000 to 20,000 people were tried during this time, nowhere near the 340,592 suggested in 1808 by the Inquisition's critic and former secretary Juan Antonio Llorente (1756–1823).
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The activity of the Inquisition in Coimbra quickly spread over the province of Beira. It sent its agents to Trancoso, of which the richest inhabitants were Neo-Christians, most of whom fled to the mountains. Thirty-five persons, the old and sick, who had been unable to escape, were arrested and thrown into the prisons of the Inquisition. The first inquisitor in Evora was Pedro Alvares de Paredes, a Castilian who had been inquisitor in Llerena, but had been dismissed on account of various irregularities. He possessed a rare faculty for extorting avowals from the accused. He forged letters and read forged decisions to the prisoners, and by this means forced his victims to admit what he demanded of them.
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