Why did inquisition happen

Due to the increasing animosity, many Jews who did not renounce their faith were killed or expelled from Spain. They took with them a great deal of the culture and traditions that until this point had enriched the country.

The Jews were a threat to the monarchy, and the Catholic Monarchs saw the Inquisition as a way to root out the source of one of their biggest problems.

Furthermore, in the 15th century the territory of present-day Spain was at war with Italy and the Catholic Monarchs had recently reconquered Granada , making poor economic conditions widespread among the majority of the population. Since the Jewish community enjoyed a higher socioeconomic status, the Catholic Monarchs feared a popular uprising and the expulsion of the Jews meant the end of this problem as well as the acquisition of their property after they were killed or fled the country.

With the invention of the printing press in , the Church was overwhelmed with the scope of their project.

Ideas—both good and bad— could circulate with astonishing speed. If Luther had lived several hundred years earlier, only the inhabitants of Nuremberg would probably have known about his complaints. Prior to the printing press, a heresy could have been confined to a single area, to one city even.

If someone came up with a crazy idea, e. This was no longer the case. The Protestant Reformation of dealt the Church another severe blow in its mission to stop the spread of heresy. Catholics were now expressly forbidden from reading Martin Luther or any books written by Protestants. But the Church soon realized that not all Protestant intellectual work is heretical.

Is that allowed? Is that not allowed? A Roman physician approached the Inquisition, pleading for permission to read scholarly material published by the sixteenth-century German physician and botanist Leonhart Fuchs. So when did this painstaking process of sifting through information to determine whether it is heresy or not come to an end? Women, children, the infirm and the aged were not exempt. A popular torture method was the rack, which would stretch victims, while others involved suspending a person from the ceiling by the wrists.

The accused could also be forced to ingest water with a cloth in the mouth, so they felt like were drowning. Punishments ranged from wearing a penitential garment for various lengths of time the rest of their life in some cases , to acts of penance, lashings or, in the case of unrepentant or relapsed heretics, burning at the stake.

Again, this is hotly debated with estimates ranging from 30, to as many as , There are some, however, who believe that the horrors of the Inquisition have been exaggerated, and that just one per cent of the , people believed to have been tried were executed.

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