How Do You Understand The Spanish Inquisition?
Known to most people today (if at all) as the punchline in a very funny Monty Python sketch, the Spanish Inquisition was taken quite seriously by Spanish subjects who fell under its sway in the late 15th century. Essentially, the Inquisition was a series of tribunals that enforced Catholic orthodoxy in what was then (at least in theory) the most Catholic of all countries. In any case, here are some things you may not have known about the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition wasn’t the first of its kind. The institution of the Inquisition was created by the Pope in the late 12th century, as a way of eliminating religious schism. Before it reared its head in Spain, the “Papal Inquisition” stamped out heresy in various European locales, mostly in southern France and northern Italy. Spain had inherited a multicultural society. Until the early 13th century, a large part of Spain had been occupied by the Moors, an invading Muslim tribe from northern Africa. During their supremacy, th
