The Spanish Inquisition kept minutes of its own torture sessions. Its rules required a notary to be present in the chamber, with orders to record whatever the prisoner said, and the finished pages were filed with the rest of the case. A great many of those files survive. One concerns a woman named Elvira Delcampo, tortured at Toledo in April 1568.

The accusation against her was that she would not eat pork and that she put on clean linen on Saturdays. The notary’s pages have her asking the judges more than once to tell her what she was supposed to confess. Her cries about her arms are entered as testimony. The notary kept count of the turns of the cord as well, and he got to sixteen, at which point the cord broke.

The tribunal lasted about 350 years, and much of what is known about it comes out of its own paperwork, a good deal of it in the words of the people it was done to. The story begins in Seville, some 90 years before any tribunal existed. In 1391, Seville had one of the large Jewish communities of Castile, living in a walled quarter beside the royal palace. For thirteen years, a churchman named Ferrán Martínez, the archdeacon of Écija, had been preaching against them around the city.

He wanted the synagogues pulled down, and he told his listeners that a Christian who harmed a Jew would face no anger from God. Two kings ordered him to stop, and so did his own archbishop. He carried on. Both the archbishop and the king died in 1390, within a few months of each other, and the new king was eleven years old.

Martínez found himself administering the diocese with nobody above him. A crowd attacked the Jewish quarter in March 1391 and was beaten back, and the city authorities had two of the ringleaders flogged. On the 6th of June, the crowd came again at dawn and set fire to the gates. The older Spanish histories put the dead in Seville at 4,000.

Modern scholars think the figure was much lower, perhaps a few hundred, with most of the quarter accepting baptism that day to stay alive. A Jewish letter written that autumn says that some of the women and children were sold to Muslims as slaves. The community ceased to exist. Its synagogues were turned into churches, and one of them still stands.

From Seville, the violence spread along the roads. Córdoba went within days, with Jaén and Ubeda close behind. By the 20th of June it had reached Toledo. In July it crossed into the crown of Aragon and hit Valencia, where a couple of hundred were killed.

In August it reached Palma on Majorca, where the dead are put at about 300, and Barcelona soon after. The Jews of Barcelona who survived the first day took refuge in the royal castle and were besieged there. The philosopher Hasdai Crescas was away at the king’s court when it happened, and his only son was in the city. Crescas wrote a letter to the Jews of Aigues-Mortes that autumn, going through the destroyed communities one at a time.

Of Barcelona he says that many killed themselves, that some threw themselves from the tower, and that among the dead was his son, whom he calls a bridegroom and an innocent lamb. Nobody has a reliable total for that summer. Over the following years, across the whole peninsula, something like 100,000 Jews accepted baptism, and some estimates run to double that. A new word came into use for them: conversos, the converted.

Old Christians had a ruder word, marranos, usually taken to mean swine. Those baptisms are where the story of the Inquisition starts. Under church law, a baptism accepted under threat still counted. Once the water touched you, you were a Christian for life, and so were your children.

A Jew could go on living in Spain as a Jew, paying special taxes and keeping to the quarter. A baptized man who lit a candle on a Friday evening fell into another category of law. He was a heretic, and the penalty for an unrepentant heretic all over medieval Europe was fire. The pressure continued.

Around 1412, the Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer toured Castile and Aragon, followed by a company of flagellants who whipped themselves as they walked. He is described entering synagogues with a crucifix in his hand and preaching to congregations who had little choice about listening. Ferrer himself spoke against forced baptism, but the laws passed in Castile at the same moment left Jews few alternatives. They were shut into separate quarters, barred from most trades, and forbidden decent cloth.

Tens of thousands more converted. By about 1420, Spain held a very large population who had been Jews a generation earlier and were now, on paper, Catholics. Many of them had received little or no instruction in their new religion. For a couple of generations, they prospered.

Freed from the restrictions that had boxed in their grandparents, conversos went into the church and became bishops. They ran royal finances, sat on city councils, and married into the nobility. By the middle of the 1400s, a fair number of the great houses of Castile and Aragon had a converted ancestor somewhere in the family tree. The best-known example is Solomon HaLevi, the chief rabbi of Burgos, who was baptized around the time of the massacres, took the name Pablo de Santa María, and ended his life as bishop of Burgos, the city where he had been rabbi.

One of his sons followed him as bishop. Old Christian resentment of all this broke out in blood more than once. Toledo rose against its conversos in 1449, and the city council passed a statute barring anyone of Jewish descent from public office, whatever his personal beliefs. It was the first of the blood purity laws, and laws of that sort stayed on Spanish books for 400 years.

Toledo rioted again in 1467. In Córdoba in 1473, a girl in an upstairs room tipped out some water during a religious procession and it splashed a statue of the Virgin. A blacksmith shouted that it was urine thrown deliberately from a converso house. Three days of killing and looting followed.

Beneath the resentment lay a question that could not be settled from the outside. How many of these people were Christians by conviction, and how many were keeping the old religion at home? The trial records of later decades show both ends of that range: sincere Catholics, and families who observed the Sabbath in secret, with many households in between keeping scraps of custom whose meaning they had half forgotten. Seville was where matters came to a head.

The prior of the Dominican House of San Pablo, Alonso de Hojeda, had been campaigning for action against the conversos for years, and when Queen Isabella stayed in the city through 1477 and into the following year, he had her ear. Pope Sixtus IV issued the bull in November 1478. It allowed Ferdinand and Isabella to appoint two or three priests over 40 years of age as inquisitors anywhere in their kingdoms and to dismiss and replace them as they saw fit. That last clause was new.

Inquisitions had operated in Europe for over two centuries under the authority of popes and bishops. This one would answer to the crown. Ferdinand seems to have understood the value of that clause better than the pope did. In September 1480, the monarchs named two Dominicans and sent them to Seville.

The friars arrived that autumn and set up in Hojeda’s convent of San Pablo. Word had traveled ahead of them. Conversos left the city in large numbers for the estates of the great Andalusian lords, hoping that royal officers would not follow them there. At the start of January 1481, the inquisitors issued a proclamation ordering the nobles of the region to arrest the refugees on their lands and send them back to Seville within 15 days, under threat of excommunication and loss of their offices.

The nobles complied. So many prisoners came back that San Pablo could not hold them, and the tribunal moved across the river to the castle of San Jorge in Triana at the far end of the pontoon bridge. The castle served as its prison for the next three centuries. For those who stayed or were brought back, the inquisitors announced a period of grace.

Anyone who came forward freely and confessed would be treated with mercy. Large numbers did so. A confession was only accepted as complete, though, if it named the other people the penitent had seen practicing Jewish rites, relatives included. Every confession produced fresh names, and when the period of grace closed, the two friars were holding evidence against a great many people who had chosen to stay silent.

As a method of generating cases, it could hardly have been improved. The tribunal held its first auto de fe, its first act of faith, on the 6th of February 1481. Six people were taken out to the fields of Tablada south of the city walls and burned. A second burning followed within days, and the chronicler Bernáldez says that some of the richest men in the city died in it, their wealth being no help to them.

The burnings came quickly. By early November of 1481, 298 people had been burned at Seville, with 79 more sentenced to prison for life. Bernáldez offers his own running total for the first 8 years: more than 700 burned, he says, and more than 5,000 reconciled, meaning people who confessed and were taken back into the church after punishment. The dead were prosecuted as well.

Heresy could be tried after death, and if the dead person was found guilty, the estate could be taken from the heirs. The procedure became standard: the remains were carried to the auto in a box alongside an effigy bearing the dead person’s name, and both were burned. A family could lose its house over a grandmother who had been buried for 30 years. Conversos who had escaped to Rome carried their complaints to the Pope.

On the 29th of January 1482, less than a year after that first burning, Sixtus IV wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella. The inquisitors at Seville, he said, had imprisoned many people without observing legal process, subjected them to severe tortures, declared them heretics without foundation, and stripped the goods of those they put to death. He went further that April in a bull aimed at the tribunals in Aragon, writing that the Inquisition there had been moved by lust for wealth, with no zeal for the faith, and that true and faithful Christians had been thrust into prison on the word of enemies, tortured, condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their property, and handed over to be executed. He ordered that the accused be told the names of the witnesses against them, be allowed legal counsel, and be allowed to appeal to Rome.

Ferdinand’s reply went back in May. He affected to doubt that the bull was genuine. If the pope really had granted these concessions, he wrote, it could only be through the cunning persuasion of the conversos, and he did not intend to let them take effect. He closed with a sentence that kings rarely addressed to popes: take care, therefore, not to let the matter go further.

Sixtus suspended the bull that October, and it was not revived. The following year, Ferdinand and Isabella placed the whole operation under one man. Tomás de Torquemada was past 60 when he took charge. Born around 1420, the nephew of a cardinal, he had entered the Dominican order young and had served for 22 years as prior of the convent of Santa Cruz in Segovia.

Somewhere in those years, he became confessor to a young princess named Isabella, well before anyone expected her to reign. He was named Inquisitor General for Castile in 1483, and that October his authority was extended over the crown of Aragon. In November 1484, Torquemada gathered his inquisitors at Seville and gave them a set of written instructions, 28 articles to begin with, which he extended several times afterward. Inquisitors were still working from them generations later.

They are dry documents, and what they describe clause by clause is the following. A tribunal arriving in a new district preaches a sermon and announces a term of grace of 30 or 40 days. Anyone who comes forward inside that term and confesses heresy will escape death and the full loss of property. The confession has to be complete, and a complete confession includes the names of everyone the penitent saw doing the same.

Once the term closes, the guilty forfeit everything they own, dated back to their first heretical act, so that property sold in good faith years earlier can be reclaimed from the buyer. The dead are to be tried as diligently as the living, even 30 or 40 years after burial, their bones dug up and burned, and their estates taken from the heirs. Fugitives are to be tried in their absence and burned in effigy. Where the evidence against a prisoner is half complete, the inquisitors may order torture.

A confession made under it must be repeated freely within 3 days, and a prisoner who takes it back can be tortured a second time. The children and grandchildren of the condemned may hold no public office, may not become priests, judges, notaries, physicians, or surgeons, and may not wear silk, carry arms, or ride a horse. With the rules fixed, the tribunals multiplied. Toledo had one of the wealthiest converso communities in Castile.

When the tribunal moved there in 1485, a group of conversos planned to rise during the Corpus Christi procession and kill the inquisitors. The plan was betrayed, and the plotters were hanged. The inquisitors then turned to the city’s practicing Jews, who were still living there openly. They summoned the rabbis and made them swear to order their congregations, under the most solemn curse of the synagogue, to report any baptized Christian they knew to be keeping Jewish customs.

The Jews of Toledo knew which conversos bought kosher meat and who sent oil for the synagogue lamps. They were now bound by oath to say so. It was a shrewd use of one threatened community against another. The term of grace in Toledo brought in confessions by the thousand, and the penitents were processed in batches.

An anonymous local witness described the first of them. On Sunday the 12th of February 1486, 750 men and women were marched from the church of San Pedro Mártir to the cathedral. He notes that the cold was severe. The men went bareheaded and barefoot without hose.

The women went with their faces uncovered, and all of them carried unlit candles. A great crowd had come in from the countryside to watch. The penitents, he says, went along howling and weeping and tearing their hair, and he remarks that in his opinion they wept more for the dishonor than for having offended God. At the cathedral door, two priests stood waiting.

As each person went in, a priest made the sign of the cross on the forehead and said, Receive the sign of the cross which you denied and lost. Inside, the sentences were announced. The penitents were to be flogged in procession on six Fridays in succession, stripped to the waist, men and women alike, with cords of hemp. They could never hold office or wear fine cloth.

A fifth of all they owned would go toward the war with Granada. If they relapsed, they would burn. 750 walked in February, 900 in April, and 750 more in June. The burnings began that summer.

In the middle of August, Toledo burned 25 people in a day. 23 went to the stake on a single morning the next year, one of them a canon of the cathedral. 20 men and 17 women were burned on one day in July of 1488, and on the day following, the bones and effigies of more than a hundred of the dead. Events in Aragon showed that resistance was dangerous.

The town of Teruel shut its gates against the inquisitors, who withdrew to a nearby village and excommunicated the town’s magistrates. Ferdinand had to threaten force with troops called up from the Castilian border before Teruel gave way. In Zaragoza, the capital, the inquisitor was a canon of the cathedral named Pedro de Arbués. He held autos in the first half of 1484 at which several people were executed.

A group of prominent conversos concluded that if one inquisitor were killed, others would be afraid to serve. They raised a fund and hired men to do it. On a night in the middle of September 1485, he went into the cathedral for matins and knelt near the high altar. The assassins came in while the canons were chanting.

One struck from behind, driving a blade into the neck. Arbués died of the neck wound about 2 days later. The conspirators had misjudged the city. By morning, crowds were in the streets calling for the conversos to be burned.

Arbués was venerated as a martyr from that week. Organized resistance to the Inquisition in Aragon ended there. The reprisals lasted for years. One of the assassins was executed on the 30th of June 1486.

He was dragged through the streets to the cathedral, and at the cathedral door both his hands were cut off while he was alive. He was then dragged on to the market square, beheaded and quartered, and his hands were nailed to the door of the house of deputies. While the Zaragoza executions were still going on, a second case was taking shape in Castile, and its consequences reached a good deal further. In June of 1490, a traveling wool comber named Benito García, a converso, stopped at an inn at Astorga in the north.

Some men drinking there went through his bag and found a communion wafer. They took him to the local church official, who decided the wafer was consecrated and that García intended some form of sorcery with it. García later described what was done to him. He was given 200 lashes followed by the water torture and the cords.

He confessed to having lived secretly as a Jew for 5 years, and he named men from the villages of La Guardia and Tembleque near Toledo. One was a young Jewish cobbler about 20 years old called Yucé Franco. Yucé was arrested along with his father, a man of 80. Under repeated torture, a story was assembled.

Some years earlier, the accused said, a group of Jews and conversos had taken a Christian boy of three or four from a doorway of Toledo Cathedral and carried him to a cave near La Guardia. On a Good Friday, they had reenacted the Passion on him. The heart and a stolen communion wafer were to go into a spell that would make the inquisitors, and after them all Christians, die raving. Historians who have worked through the surviving record point to what it lacks.

The prisoners’ statements disagree on the year, on who was present, and on who did the cutting. The child has no name in the record. No family in the district is known to have reported a boy missing, and no body was produced. The court convicted on the confessions.

On the 16th of November 1491, the prisoners were taken to a field outside the walls of Ávila. The conversos among them who had professed repentance were strangled at the stake before the wood was lit. Yucé Franco and his father, as Jews outside the church’s mercy, were treated otherwise. According to the account, their flesh was torn with heated pincers, and they were burned alive.

A shrine grew up at La Guardia, and the village still keeps the feast of its holy child. In later tellings, the child acquired a name, Cristóbal, and a blind mother whose sight returned at the moment of his death. Four and a half months after the fires at Ávila, Ferdinand and Isabella signed an order that Torquemada had been urging on them for years. The argument behind it was straightforward.

The Inquisition had no authority over Jews, only over the baptized. As long as practicing Jews lived in Spanish towns with their butchers and synagogues and Passover bread, the conversos would have teachers close at hand. The decree signed at Granada on the last day of March 1492 makes that case in its opening lines. Every Jew in Spain was given until the end of July to accept baptism or leave.

Two prominent Jews at court are said to have offered the king a large sum to withdraw it. A story told by later writers has Torquemada bursting into the royal chamber holding up a crucifix, declaring that Judas had sold his master for 30 pieces of silver and their majesties were about to sell him for 30,000, and throwing the cross down on the table. Whether or not that scene took place, the decree stood. How many went with them is disputed.

Older accounts speak of 200,000 exiles, and recent estimates range from about 40,000 to something over 100,000, with a comparable number choosing baptism. The Jews had 4 months, and they were forbidden to take gold, silver, or coined money out of the country. Bernáldez watched the departure and recorded it. They gave a house for a donkey, he says, and a vineyard for a piece of cloth.

Girls of 12 and over were married off in haste so that each would travel under a husband’s protection. Bernáldez describes the columns on the roads that July and mentions that the wealthier Jews paid the expenses of the poor. They went out from the lands of their birth, he writes, young and old, on foot and on donkeys and in carts, some falling and others rising, some dying and others being born, some falling sick, so that no Christian saw them without feeling sorry for them. The rabbis had the women and boys sing and beat tambourines as they walked to keep up their courage.

He adds a scene from the coast near Cádiz. The rabbis had told the people along the road that God would open the sea for them as he had for their ancestors in Egypt. When the columns came in sight of the water, he says, men and women cried out and begged heaven for the miracle. They waited on the shore for many days.

The sea did not open, and they paid the captains and went aboard. The voyages were worse than the roads. Ship captains took the fares, put out to sea, robbed their passengers, and in some cases are said to have put them over the side. Plague broke out in the crowded holds.

A Genoese chronicler who saw ships come into his harbor that winter wrote that the people coming off them looked like ghosts, gaunt and hollow-eyed, that mothers carried infants who were dying of hunger, and that many of the refugees died on the quay. Torquemada spent his last years at Ávila in the monastery he had built. He died there in September of 1498 in his late 70s. A modern estimate puts the number burned alive during his 15 years at about 2,000.

A later historian of the Inquisition, who served as a secretary three centuries later and worked in its archives, gave a figure more than four times that, 8,800 burned with some 90,000 punished in other ways. Historians have disputed his method ever since. For most Spaniards in most towns, contact with the tribunals started with a sermon. An inquisitor arriving in a town with his notary and his constable had the population summoned to the main church on a Sunday or feast day.

Attendance was required. After the sermon, a clerk went up into the pulpit and recited a long document from start to finish. During the early decades, this was the edict of grace with its 30 or 40 days of amnesty. From about 1500 the amnesty was dropped, and the document became the edict of faith.

Everyone present was ordered, under pain of excommunication, to come forward within a set number of days and report any heresy they had seen or heard of committed by anyone living or dead. The edict then told them what to look for. The surviving texts run roughly as follows. If you know or have heard of anyone who keeps the Sabbath, putting on clean shirts and clean clothes on Saturdays, who puts clean sheets on the bed and a clean cloth on the table on Friday evening, who lights new wicks in the lamps on Friday earlier than on other nights, who cooks on Friday the food for Saturday, who cuts the fat and the sinew from meat or soaks it in water to draw out the blood, who cuts the throat of a bird or a sheep after testing the knife against a fingernail, who eats meat in Lent, who keeps the fast of the great day going barefoot or the fast of Queen Esther, who blesses a child by passing a hand over its head without making the sign of the cross, who washes the bodies of the dead in warm water, who when dying turns the face toward the wall.

A good half of that list is laundry and cooking. An edict like that, repeated to the same town year upon year, turned housekeeping into evidence. A woman who liked a clean shirt at the weekend could be a suspect, and so could a man whose stomach would not take pork. The people best placed to notice were the people who lived closest.

A maid knew which day the sheets were changed. A cook knew how she had been told to trim the meat. A good share of the denunciations in the files come from servants and neighbors, and many more from relatives. Husbands informed on wives, and children were questioned about what their parents did at home on Friday evenings.

A heretic who repented could live. The heresy was secret Judaism, and the penalty, for those who would not or could not abandon it, was fire. Behind the tribunal’s salaried staff stood a body of lay helpers called familiars. They were ordinary men of good standing who held a license from the holy office, could carry arms in its name, enjoyed certain legal privileges, and were expected to assist when called on.

Their number at the peak is put at perhaps 20,000 across Spain. The post brought standing and exemptions, and it was sought after for those reasons. When a denunciation came in, the file went to a panel of theologians who were shown the alleged words or acts with the names removed and asked whether they amounted to heresy. If the answer was yes, the prosecutor requested an arrest.

The constable came with a notary and a receiver of confiscated goods. While the prisoner was taken away, the notary went through the house making an inventory. These inventories survive in large numbers. They list the furniture and the cooking pots, the clothes in the chest, and the debts owed and owing.

Everything listed was sequestered on the spot to be held against the outcome of the trial, and items were sold off as needed to pay for the prisoner’s food. A family accused of nothing could be left without means overnight. The problem was common enough that the revised instructions of 1561 made provision for a prisoner’s wife and children to be supported out of the sequestered goods. The prisoner, meanwhile, disappeared from view.

The Inquisition’s jails were called the secret prisons, and the term was meant literally. Prisoners had no visitors and no letters, and they were not given mass or the sacraments while the case was open. The family was told nothing about the charge or the progress of the trial. Cases commonly lasted 2 or 3 years, and some ran far longer.

At the first hearing, the inquisitor asked for the prisoner’s name and genealogy, and whether any relative had ever been in trouble with the Holy Office. He had the prisoner recite the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Creed, and any stumbling was noted. He then asked whether the prisoner knew the reason for the arrest. A prisoner who said no was told that the Holy Office did not arrest people without cause and was urged to search his memory and unburden his conscience.

Prisoners trying to guess the charge sometimes confessed to things the tribunal had not known about and named people who had not been under suspicion. The secrecy of witnesses was the feature conversos most wanted changed. In 1519, a group of them offered the young Charles V a very large sum, several hundred thousand ducats by one account, if the names of accusers were disclosed to the accused. The offer was refused.

Torture in the Spanish Inquisition was a formal legal step, and like every other step, it generated paper. It was ordered when the inquisitors believed a prisoner was guilty but had not fully confessed, or had confessed and would not name accomplices. A sentence of torture was drawn up and signed, and it regularly carried a clause of the following sort. If in the said torment the prisoner should die or be maimed, or if blood should flow or a limb be broken, the blame and the fault shall be hers and not ours, for refusing to tell the truth.

Present in the chamber were the inquisitors, a representative of the bishop, the notary, and the man who did the work, usually the public executioner of the town. The trial records describe three methods. The first is the garrucha, the pulley. The prisoner’s wrists were tied behind the back.

A rope ran from the wrists up over a pulley in the ceiling, and the body was hoisted so that its weight hung from arms forced backward. Weights could be tied to the feet. The rope was then released and caught just short of the floor, and the jolt could pull the arms from their sockets. The second is the toca, the water.

The prisoner was bound on a sloping trestle with the head lower than the feet, and the mouth was held open. A strip of linen was laid into it, and water was poured slowly from a jar onto the cloth, carrying the linen down into the throat. The prisoner could neither swallow it nor breathe past it. The clerks recorded the number of jars used.

The third, and by the 1500s the most common, is the potro, the rack. The Spanish version was a frame or bench to which the prisoner was bound. Cords were passed around the arms and legs, and each cord ran to a stick. The executioner twisted the stick, and the cord bit into the flesh, and each twist was entered in the record as one turn.

The prisoner was stripped beforehand, women included. The inquisitor said, Tell the truth. He did not say about what. No suggestive question was supposed to be put, a suggested answer being legally worthless.

And so the person on the frame had to work out what these men wanted to hear. A confession made in the chamber had to be confirmed a day later in another room for the law to regard it as freely given. A prisoner who refused to confirm could be taken down again. Church law held that torture could be applied only once, and the clerks dealt with that by recording each session as suspended, to be continued on a later date.

Elvira Delcampo, the woman from the start of this story, was the wife of a scrivener named Alonso de Oya and lived near Toledo. She was of converso descent. In 1567, two men who worked for her husband and lived in the house reported that she would not eat pork and that she put on clean linen on Saturdays. Against that, a line of witnesses, several of them priests, testified that she attended mass and confession and had every appearance of a good Christian.

She was pregnant when she was arrested, and she gave birth in the cells that summer. Her trial resumed when she had recovered. She admitted freely that she avoided pork. It made her sick, she said, and her mother had never served it.

She denied any religious motive. The inquisitors were not satisfied, and in early April of 1568, she was taken to the chamber. What follows is taken from the notary’s record of the session. She was told to tell the truth and said she had nothing to say.

She was ordered stripped. When she was stripped, she said, Señores, I have done all that is said of me, and I bear false witness against myself, for I do not want to see myself in such trouble. Please God, I have done nothing. The tying of her arms began.

She said, I have told the truth. What have I to tell? One cord was applied to the arms and twisted. She screamed and said, I have done all they say.

She was told to say in detail what she had done. She answered, I have already told the truth. She screamed again and said, Tell me what you want, for I don’t know what to say. Another turn was ordered.

She said, Loosen me a little that I may remember what I have to tell. I don’t know what I have done. I did not eat pork, for it made me sick. I have done everything.

Loosen me and I will tell the truth. Another turn. She said, Loosen me and I will tell it. I don’t know what I have to tell.

Lord have mercy on me, a sinner. It continues in the same way for pages. They are hurting me. Señores, they are breaking my arm.

Remind me of what I have to say, for I don’t know it. She repeats that she did not eat pork, that she does not know what they want, and asks whether someone will not tell her. At one point she cries, Oh, my arms. And the notary writes it down.

The record notes 16 turns of the cord, and at the 16th the cord broke. She was then moved to the potro, and cords were put on her legs. She said, Señores, why will you not tell me what I have to say? Put me on the ground.

Have I not said that I did it all? They told her to give the details. She said, I don’t remember. Take me away from here.

I did what the witnesses say. The linen was placed in her mouth and the jar was brought. She managed to say, Take it away. I am strangling.

I am sick at my stomach. The water was poured. Afterward, she asked to be allowed to confess to a priest, saying that she was dying. She was told the torture would continue until she told the truth.

She had nothing more to give them, and the session was suspended. Four days passed before the second session. On being stripped again, she broke down. She told them that when she was 11 years old, her mother had instructed her not to eat pork and to keep the Sabbath, and that she had understood this to be the law of the Jews.

The judges settled on reconciliation. She appeared at the auto in Toledo that June and heard her sentence: the loss of her property and 3 years of prison, with the robe of shame to be worn in public. The prison term was commuted after about 6 months. She came out with nothing, to a town where her case had been announced from a scaffold and her descendants were barred from honorable trades.

As for the child born in the cell, no record mentions it again. An auto de fe was designed to be seen by as many people as possible. It was announced weeks ahead. Criers went through the streets, and word spread out to the villages.

A large auto could draw tens of thousands, and an indulgence was granted to those who attended. Carpenters built tiered staging in the main square, with one bank of seats for the inquisitors and dignitaries and another for the prisoners. The worst offenders were placed on the highest row. Householders around the square rented out their balconies.

Most prisoners learned their sentence only when it was announced from the platform. Those who were going to die were told the night before. An inquisitor came to the cell with a notary and informed the prisoner that he or she would be handed over to the secular arm in the morning. Friars were assigned to stay through the night, urging repentance.

A great deal depended on those hours. A prisoner who confessed and asked for mercy even then would be strangled before the fire was lit. One who held out would burn alive. Before dawn, the prisoners were dressed.

Each was given a sanbenito, a tunic of yellow cloth that hung to the knees. For those to be reconciled, it carried a red diagonal cross on the chest and back. For someone sentenced to burn who had then confessed in time, the robe was painted with flames pointing downward. For those going to the stake unrepentant, it was black, painted with upward flames and with devils.

On their heads went the coroza, a tall cone of pasteboard painted to match. Those to be flogged wore a rope halter about the neck. The order of the procession was fixed. A parish cross came first, draped in black.

Behind it walked the penitents in ascending order of guilt. Near the back came effigies carried on poles, figures in painted robes with names lettered across the chest, standing for the fugitives and the dead. Behind a dead person’s effigy, a man carried a chest holding the exhumed bones. The living who were to die came last, with a friar on either side.

Once everyone was seated, a sermon was preached, and the whole assembly, the king included if he was present, swore an oath to defend the holy office. The sentences followed. Each prisoner was brought forward in turn, while the case was recited, the offenses first and the punishment after. With a hundred prisoners, this took the entire day.

The death sentences came last, and the wording was careful. The church did not shed blood. The tribunal declared that it could do no more for this person and was relaxing him to the secular arm, and it handed him to the royal magistrate with a formal request, written into every such sentence, that the magistrate treat him mercifully. The magistrate then pronounced sentence of death by fire.

The burning place lay outside the walls, and the condemned were taken there directly, usually on donkeys. At the stake, each was asked a last time in what faith he wished to die. If he answered the faith of the Roman church, the executioner tightened a cord or an iron collar around his neck from behind the post, and the wood was lit under a dead man. If he answered otherwise, or could not answer through the gag, he burned alive.

Effigies and boxes of bones went onto the same fire, and the ashes were scattered afterward so that nothing remained to be buried. The lesser sentences were carried out on the following days. Those condemned to the lash were mounted on donkeys, stripped to the waist, men and women alike, and taken through the main streets while the executioner laid on the appointed number and a crier called out the offense. Afterward, the robes were collected.

Each was labeled with the wearer’s name and offense and hung in the person’s parish church along with those of the burned. They were meant to stay there permanently. When the cloth rotted, it was replaced by a painted canvas with the same wording, and inquisitors on their tours of inspection checked that none had been removed. A family might attend mass for generations beneath a canvas stating that one of its members had been burned as a Judaizing heretic.

By the middle of the 16th century, the first great wave against the conversos had passed. Most of the old Judaizing families had been burned, broken, or frightened into conformity, and the tribunals were occupied with lesser offenses. In 1557, the inquisitors at Seville came across a new kind of heresy in the city. The trail began with a muleteer called Julián Hernández, known as Julianillo, who had been smuggling Protestant books overland from Geneva, hidden, it is said, in wine casks.

Through him, the tribunal traced a circle of secret Protestants in Seville. Some months later, a second group turned up at Valladolid, then the seat of the court. It numbered perhaps 55 people. They included nuns from an aristocratic convent and a nobleman’s son.

At their center was Dr. Agustín de Cazalla, a celebrated preacher who had served as a chaplain to the emperor Charles V. The emperor, in his last months, wrote urging that these people be treated as rebels and punished without the mercy normally shown to first offenders. The Inquisitor General obtained from Rome a brief allowing him to execute heretics even if they repented.

The first of the Valladolid autos took place on Trinity Sunday, the 21st of May 1559, before the regent Juana and the 14-year-old heir Don Carlos. People are said to have been sleeping in the fields around the city to be sure of a place. About 30 prisoners came out, and 14 of them were to die. Cazalla had broken completely.

He confessed, wept, praised the Inquisition for saving his soul, and preached repentance to the other prisoners from the scaffold. Under the old rules that would have saved his life. Under the new brief, it earned him the garrote, and he was strangled and burned along with his brother, a parish priest who went gagged to the end, and his sister Beatriz. Their mother, in whose house the group had met, had died before the arrests.

Her coffin was exhumed and carried in the procession with an effigy on top, and her bones were burned with her children. One man of the 14 refused to recant. Antonio Herrezuelo was a young lawyer from the town of Toro, and he went to the auto gagged. His wife, Leonor de Cisneros, in her early twenties, had confessed under pressure and stood on the platform in the robe of the reconciled.

The accounts say he gave her a look of reproach as he was taken past. At the burning ground, a stone thrown from the crowd cut his forehead open, and a guard, angered by his calm, stabbed him in the belly with a halberd. He was chained to the post, and the fire was lit. A priest stood close enough to watch every movement and wrote about it afterward.

Herrezuelo could not speak for the gag. The priest says he stood in the flames like a flint, without a complaint or any sign of pain, and he died with the strangest sadness in his face that the priest had ever seen. The priest was a loyal Catholic historian, and he put that description in a book written to celebrate the event. His widow was sent to a house of penance.

After some years of it, she told her confessors that she held her husband’s beliefs and could not be moved from them. She was burned alive at Valladolid on the 26th of September 1568. The second Valladolid auto was held on the 8th of October, and the new king had returned from the Netherlands in time to preside. Philip II took the oath to the Holy Office standing with his sword drawn.

Among those to die was the man who had first brought the new ideas to Valladolid, an Italian nobleman in Spanish service named Carlos de Seso, who had been royal governor of Toro. He had spent well over a year in the cells. Protestant accounts say he had been racked so severely that he could not stand unaided and that two familiars held him up. As he passed the royal balcony, he called up to Philip, asking how the king could allow a gentleman to be burned.

Philip’s reply was repeated across Europe. I would carry the wood to burn my own son, he said, if he were as wicked as you. De Seso was gagged throughout the ceremony. At the stake, the gag was removed so that he could recant, and he said instead that he could show them they were damning themselves by not doing as he did, if he had the time, and told them to light the wood that was to consume him.

Beside him stood a servant called Juan Sánchez, also condemned to burn alive. When the fire burned through the ropes holding him, Sánchez leapt clear and climbed up onto the scaffold. The friars called on him to repent and promised him a quick death. From where he was, he could see De Seso standing unmoved in the flames.

Sánchez looked, and then threw himself back into the fire. Seville dealt with its own Protestants at two autos in September of 1559 and December of the following year. By one count, some 19 people were burned at the first and 14 at the second. Roughly 100 people were executed as Protestants in Spain in those years, and the movement did not recover.

The alarm of 1559 reached well above muleteers and nuns. On a night that August, officers of the Inquisition entered a house in the town of Torrelaguna and arrested Bartolomé Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo and head of the Spanish church. Carranza had attended Charles V on his deathbed and had spent years in England helping Mary Tudor’s church pursue Protestants. He had also written a catechism in which his rivals found phrases that sounded like Luther.

He was confined to two rooms in Valladolid for more than 7 years, so cut off that he did not learn of the great fire that destroyed much of the city while he was there. The Pope then claimed the case, and Carranza spent nine more years in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. In April of 1576, he was sentenced to renounce a list of suspect propositions. He died 18 days later.

The whole affair had taken 17 years and turned on a catechism. The crown also found the tribunal useful in matters that had little to do with doctrine. In 1590, Antonio Pérez, the king’s disgraced former secretary, escaped from prison in Madrid and fled to Aragon, whose laws shielded him from royal justice. The Inquisition was the one court with authority in both kingdoms.

Charges of heresy were drawn up against Pérez based on oaths he was said to have uttered in anger, and the inquisitors of Zaragoza claimed him as their prisoner. The city rioted twice to keep him out of their hands, and on the second occasion the crowd set him free. He escaped to France. Philip sent an army into Aragon and had the kingdom’s chief justice beheaded without trial.

At an auto in Zaragoza in 1592, Pérez was burned in effigy, and a number of those involved in the riots were sentenced alongside the figure. The moriscos were the other large population of forced converts. When Granada surrendered in 1492, its Muslims were promised in writing that they could keep their religion. The promise held for about 7 years.

Archbishop Cisneros arrived, began mass baptisms under pressure, and had Arabic manuscripts burned in a public square, some 5,000 volumes by one early account. A revolt followed, and its defeat was treated as cancelling the treaty. By 1502, the Muslims of Castile had been told to convert or leave. In Valencia, the process was rougher.

During a rising of Christian artisans in the 1520s, armed bands forced the Muslim peasants of whole districts to baptism, and the reports describe water being sprinkled over crowds with brooms and branches. A commission of theologians was asked whether such baptisms were valid and ruled that they were. From 1526, Islam had no legal existence in Spain. In its place stood some 300,000 new Christians, most of whom spoke Arabic and had been taught very little of their new religion.

All of them came under the Holy Office. For about 40 years, the morisco communities bought time. They paid large collective subsidies to the crown, and in exchange the Inquisition agreed to restraint. Policy hardened in the 1560s.

On the 1st of January 1567, a royal decree was proclaimed in Granada giving the moriscos 3 years to stop using Arabic. It banned their dress, their surnames, their music, and their public baths. The mountain villages of the Alpujarras rose on Christmas Eve of 1568. The village priests who had kept the attendance lists for mass and reported absentees were among the first to be seized.

The crown’s response took 2 years and was as savage. At the hilltown of Galera in February of 1570, the king’s half brother, Don John of Austria, stormed the walls and had some 2,500 of the inhabitants killed before the survivors were enslaved and the town leveled and sown with salt. That November, the morisco population of the old kingdom of Granada, by most estimates around 80,000 people, was marched north in columns to be dispersed across Castile. Don John wrote that it was the saddest sight in the world, with so much rain, wind, and snow that the people clung to one another lamenting.

A large share of them, perhaps one in five, died on the road. From the 1560s to 1610, moriscos made up the bulk of the business at the tribunals of Granada, Valencia, and Zaragoza. Thousands of cases in all, for keeping Ramadan, for circumcising a son, for reciting the profession of faith at a deathbed. Some went to the stake, and many more to the galleys or the lash.

By then, a number of senior churchmen had concluded that the moriscos could not be converted, and in April of 1609, Philip III signed the order to expel them. Valencia went first. About 117,000 people, close to a third of that kingdom, were taken down to the ports with what they could carry. They were robbed on the roads, and some children were taken from the columns by old Christian families.

Aragon followed. Then Castile and Andalucía. Over 5 years, about 275,000 people were shipped out by one count. Many were landed near Oran, where local tribesmen robbed and killed an unknown number of them.

Some observers of the time believed that the greater part of the exiles died within months. No reliable figure exists. Native Spaniards were not the tribunal’s only prisoners. A foreign ship that tied up in a Spanish harbor could expect a visit.

Officers of the Holy Office boarded incoming vessels to inspect the cargo for forbidden books and to question crews about their religion. For English and Dutch sailors in the age of the Reformation, this was a real hazard of the trade. The tribunal in the Canary Islands, a regular port of call for northern ships, tried a steady run of English and Flemish seamen through the later 16th century. An English merchant called Robert Tomson met it as early as the 1550s.

He had settled in Mexico City, and at a dinner one evening he was drawn into saying that in England the images of the saints had been removed from the churches and that he agreed with the change, prayer being owed to God directly. Another guest reported him. Tomson spent 7 months in prison and afterward stood in the Cathedral of Mexico in a yellow robe before a crowd that he puts at 5 or 6,000, who had come, he says, to see what a Lutheran looked like. In 1568, John Hawkins’s slaving squadron was caught by a Spanish fleet in the Mexican harbor of San Juan de Ulúa and badly mauled.

Two ships escaped, overcrowded and short of food, and Hawkins put about a hundred men ashore on the Gulf Coast at their own request, promising to return for them. He did not return. One of the men was Miles Phillips, who was about 14. The party walked for days.

Local warriors stripped them and killed several. The rest surrendered to the Spaniards and were marched to Mexico City, where to their surprise they were treated decently. They were placed as servants with Spanish gentlemen and lived well for some years. The Inquisition was established in Mexico in 1571, and its first inquisitor began with the English.

Phillips says they were collected from all over the country. Their goods were seized, and they were locked in separate dungeons so dark that they could see nothing without a candle. He says they were held about a year and a half. They were brought up one at a time and told to recite their prayers and the creed in Latin, which he admits most of them could not do.

They were asked what they believed about the bread and wine on the altar. If they did not answer that it was the very body and blood, he writes, there was no way but death. About 3 months before the auto, he says they were all racked, and some were forced to say things against themselves that afterward cost them their lives. On the morning itself, each man received a cup of wine and a slice of bread fried in honey, and they were walked out into a square so crowded that the familiars on horseback had to clear a lane.

The sentences lasted until dark. Three were burned. Phillips and several other boys were sentenced to serve in monasteries for terms of years, wearing the penitential coat throughout. The flogging took place the following day, Good Friday.

60 men were stripped to the waist, mounted on horses, and taken through the principal streets of Mexico City. Criers went ahead calling, Behold these English dogs, Lutherans, enemies to God. The men came back to the prison with their backs all gore blood, in his words. Phillips served his term, escaped and was recaptured, escaped a second time, and reached home in 1582, some 14 years after he had sailed.

Half a century later, another traveler published a closer account from inside the chamber itself. William Lithgow was a Scot from Lanark who had spent the better part of 19 years traveling on foot through Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. In the autumn of 1620, he was at Málaga waiting for a ship to Alexandria. An English fleet sent against the Algerian pirates anchored off the town for some days, and Lithgow went out to visit men he knew aboard.

After the fleet sailed, the governor of Málaga had him seized at night. He was accused of being a spy. His account of what followed was published in London at a time of strong feeling against Spain, and modern scholars treat some of it with caution. This is what he says happened.

He was locked in a room and fitted with leg irons, a heavy bolt with a shackle at either end that held his legs apart so that he could neither stand nor sit properly and lay on his back on the floor. He lay that way for weeks on bread and water. Late in December, he was carried before dawn to a coach and driven to a wine press house among the vineyards. He was stripped and brought to the rack.

He was hung by the shoulders with cords, and his legs were drawn through the sides of the frame. A cord was tied about each ankle and hauled tight, and his knees were forced against the wood until, he writes, the sinews of his hams burst, and the lids of his knees were crushed. He carried a tattoo on his right arm done in Jerusalem some years before showing the Jerusalem cross with the crown and name of King James beneath it. The governor noticed it and ordered the mark of the heretic king torn out.

Cords were wound about that arm, and the torturers braced their feet against him and pulled. They cut the crown, sinews and flesh to the bare bones, he writes. Of the pain, he writes that his eyes began to startle, his mouth to foam and froth, and his teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s sticks. The water followed.

His mouth was forced open with iron, and a measured pot was poured in, and another after it. By his account, he was on the rack from about 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night. He was later handed to the Inquisition. An inquisitor came to the room with two Jesuits and spent 8 days trying to convert him.

He was sentenced to further torture and after Easter to be taken to Granada and burned. Chance saved him. A gentleman from Granada came to dine with the governor, who entertained him with the story of the obstinate heretic upstairs. The visitor’s Flemish servant went the next morning to the English consul, who wrote to the English ambassador in Madrid, who went to the king of Spain.

At Easter of 1621, Lithgow was released and carried aboard an English ship. He was taken to court at Theobalds on a feather bed so that King James and the household could see what he calls his martyred anatomy. The king sent him twice to Bath at royal expense to recover. His left arm was permanently crippled.

He demanded compensation from the Spanish ambassador, who promised it and did not pay, and the two men eventually came to blows in the king’s presence chamber. He is, as far as is known, the only prisoner of the Inquisition to have punched a Spanish ambassador. Accounts like these shaped what the rest of Europe believed about the tribunal. Spanish writers later gave that body of hostile literature a name, the Black Legend, and historians still argue over how much of it holds up.

Phillips and Lithgow wrote for a Protestant public that wanted to hear the worst about Spain. The cords and the jars of water they describe are also the ones in Elvira Delcampo’s file, written by the tribunal’s own notary inside Spain. Meanwhile, the tribunal’s business had spread well beyond heresy in any ordinary sense. In the kingdoms of the crown of Aragon, a papal brief of 1524 gave the tribunals at Zaragoza, Valencia, and Barcelona jurisdiction over sodomy.

A heretic who repented could live. For a man convicted of sex with another man, repentance did not alter the sentence. Between 1570 and 1630, the tribunal of Zaragoza alone heard over 500 sodomy cases and executed 102 men. Across the three tribunals, the total put to death was something over 150.

The files show few gentlemen among them. The accused were sailors, slaves, shepherds, and laborers, a notable number of priests and friars, and foreigners with nobody to speak for them. Many were in their teens or early 20s. Clergy who abused the confessional met a gentler court.

Solicitation, meaning a priest using confession to proposition a woman, came under the Inquisition from the 1560s, and thousands of cases were heard. A typical sentence was a reprimand, a ban on hearing women’s confessions, and some years of seclusion in a house of the priest’s own order. Ordinary people, meanwhile, filled the dockets for things they had said. Once the great converso prosecutions were over, most of those tried in Castile were old Christian farmers and artisans charged with what the tribunal called propositions.

They included the claim that sex between unmarried people was no sin, remarks that birth and death are all a person can be sure of, and curses against God or the saints uttered in anger. Such words could bring an appearance at an auto with a gag and a candle, a flogging through the streets, or a term at the oars. King Ferdinand had recognized early in the 1500s that the Inquisition could supply the fleet with rowers at no cost, and a galley sentence became a standard penalty for able-bodied men whom the tribunal did not burn. A Mediterranean galley was rowed by several men chained to each bench, and they lived on that bench, sleeping and eating there and relieving themselves where they sat.

They rowed to a beat under the whip. If the ship sank, they went down with it in their chains. Sentences were limited to 10 years, and many men did not survive half that. Women could not be sent to the galleys and were flogged, banished from their district, or put to unpaid work in hospitals.

While Lithgow was still walking across Europe, a village in the mountains of the north began accusing itself of witchcraft. Zugarramurdi is a small place in the Basque country of Navarre, close to the French frontier, with a large cave nearby. In December of 1608, a young woman named María de Ximilegui came back to the village after some years in France, where a fierce witch hunt was underway. She announced that she had been a witch herself, that she had attended the devil’s gatherings, and that she recognized several of her neighbors from them.

The neighbors denied it. Under pressure from their own families, they began to confess. Someone reported it to the Inquisition at Logroño. The inquisitors arrested a first handful and later dozens.

Within months, the border country was in a panic. Children by the hundred declared that they were carried off from their beds at night to the Sabbath. Parents kept them awake in shifts, and in some villages the children were gathered to sleep in the church or the priest’s house under guard. They would announce the next morning that they had been taken regardless.

Suspects were dragged from their houses by neighbors, tied up outdoors through winter nights, and ducked in rivers. Several died of such treatment before any official arrived. What the prisoners at Logroño described was the akelarre, the meadow of the he-goat. The devil presided there as a large black figure with horns.

The witches knelt and kissed him beneath the tail. They danced and coupled with him, and his touch was cold. They kept toads dressed in little suits of cloth, fed them, and whipped them to make them give up a liquid that served as flying ointment. They dug up the newly buried bodies of their own relatives, carried them to the meadow, and ate them, roasted or boiled or raw, and said that a man’s flesh tasted better than a woman’s.

They sucked the blood of small children and named the children they had killed. All of this was taken down by trained lawyers as sworn testimony. An epidemic went through the cells at Logroño. 13 of the accused died in custody before sentence.

The auto was held on the 7th and 8th of November 1610. The printed account puts the crowd at 30,000. Reciting the confessions took the better part of 2 days. 18 witches who had confessed and asked forgiveness were reconciled.

Six who had denied the charges throughout were burned alive, four women and two men. Five effigies went onto the fire beside them, with the bones of people who had died in prison. One of the three judges had voted against the burnings, and his two colleagues opposed him bitterly for years afterward. Alonso de Salazar Frías was the junior man on the bench, and he considered the evidence worthless.

The Suprema in Madrid had been wary of witch trials for the better part of a century. Salazar had support outside the tribunal as well. The Suprema allowed Salazar to test his doubts. In the spring of 1611, he left Logroño with an edict of grace, and he stayed in the hills for 8 months.

He took statements from 1,802 people. 1,384 of them were children, girls under 12 and boys under 14. Between them they accused nearly 5,000 others. Salazar proceeded to check what he was told.

He had confessed witches taken separately to the places where the Sabbath was supposed to be held and asked each where the devil sat and which way they came in. Their answers did not match. He collected jars of the ointments and powders and had them tried on animals, who came to no harm. Girls who confessed to intercourse with the devil were examined by midwives and found to be virgins.

Some 80 people asked to withdraw their confessions and told him how they had been obtained, through beatings from neighbors and relatives and promises that they could go home if they said yes. His summary states, I have not found a single proof, nor even the slightest indication from which to infer that one act of witchcraft has actually taken place. In another passage, he adds that there were neither witches nor bewitched in those villages until they were talked and written about. He was an inquisitor writing to other inquisitors, and that probably helped.

He later sat on the Suprema himself. In 1614, the Suprema issued new instructions that made a witchcraft conviction very difficult to obtain, and it ordered that the robes of the Logroño dead should not be displayed in the churches. Spain burned very few witches afterward, during a century when Germany and Scotland burned them in large numbers. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the old charge of secret Judaism was still being pressed.

Tribunals were founded at Lima and Mexico City around 1570 and at Cartagena on the Caribbean coast in 1610. The colonies were officially closed to anyone of Jewish descent. In practice, they held many Portuguese new Christians, descendants of the Jews baptized by force in 1497, who had moved into Spanish territory as merchants. Some of them kept a memory of the old faith at home.

The best documented is a young man in Mexico called Luis de Carvajal. His uncle and namesake was a conquistador, governor of a large territory on the northern frontier, and by all the evidence, a convinced Catholic. The uncle had brought his sister’s family over from Spain without knowing that they were secret Jews. Luis learned the family’s secret in his teens and embraced it.

With nobody to teach him, he put a religion together from the Old Testament in Latin. He records in his memoir that when he reached the passage in Genesis commanding circumcision, he went to a riverbank and performed it on himself with an old pair of scissors. The family was denounced in 1589. His mother was put to the torture, and Luis writes that from where he was held he could hear her cries.

They were reconciled at an auto the following year and sentenced to wear the penitential robe. Luis took a secret name, Joseph Lumbroso, Joseph the Enlightened, and wrote out his memoirs in a book small enough to hide in the palm of a hand. It is regarded as the earliest Jewish autobiography written in the Americas. Having been reconciled once, he and his family were now liable to death if caught a second time.

They were arrested again in 1595. In prison, Luis tried to encourage his mother and sisters. He scratched messages on avocado stones and fruit skins and sent them to the women’s cells hidden in food. The jailer who carried them showed them to the inquisitors, and they were copied into the file.

In February of 1596, Luis was put on the rack. He held out for a time, and over the following days he gave the inquisitors more than a hundred names, those of his mother and sisters included. While being taken back to his cell, he broke away from the guards and threw himself from a gallery into the courtyard. He survived the fall, and he later tried to withdraw what he had said.

On the 8th of December 1596, Luis de Carvajal was taken to the burning ground in Mexico City with his mother and three of his sisters. He was 30. A friar who rode beside him wrote that at the end he showed repentance and kissed a crucifix, and he was garroted before the fire, as were the four women. The youngest sister, a child at the time of the great auto, reappears in the record in 1649, as a woman in her 60s, and she was garroted and burned that year, 53 years after her mother.

Further south in Peru, a similar prosecution played out on a larger scale with a great deal more money involved. By the 1630s, much of the trade of Lima, the silver capital of Spanish South America, was handled by Portuguese merchants. So many of them were new Christians that in Spanish America the word Portuguese had become, in common speech, another word for Jew. In 1635 a young shop clerk in Lima named Antonio Cordero was reported for declining to make a sale on a Saturday and for saying that he did not eat bacon.

He was arrested discreetly and tortured, and he named his employer, who was tortured and named others. On the 11th of August, officers went from house to house and brought in 17 prominent merchants. More arrests followed over the next months until the tribunal had to take over neighboring houses and fit them out as cells. The inquisitors called it La Complicidad Grande, the great conspiracy.

The confiscations were heavy enough to bring down Lima’s principal bank. The trials lasted three and a half years with frequent use of torture. One of the prisoners was Doña Mencia de Luna, a merchant’s wife. She was put on the rack in 1638 and denied the charges.

The notary recorded the turns of the cord and her answers, and then records that she stopped answering. She was admonished several more times to tell the truth, he writes, and said nothing and appeared to have fainted. She had died. The entry closes with the usual formula that the torment was suspended to be continued when appropriate.

The formula had been written for prisoners who were still alive. The most prominent prisoner was Manuel Bautista Pérez, one of the wealthiest men in Peru. He had made his fortune in the Atlantic slave trade, shipping thousands of Africans to the Americas, and he kept a large house and a library in Lima. Other prisoners called him the great captain, and the inquisitors took that for a religious title.

In his cell, he got hold of a knife and stabbed himself several times in the belly and groin. He survived, and his trial continued. He admitted nothing. A few cells away sat a man who admitted everything and had been doing so for 12 years.

Francisco Maldonado da Silva was a surgeon born in Tucumán. When he was a boy, the Inquisition had arrested his father, also a medical man, for Judaizing, and the father returned some years later as a reconciled penitent. Francisco grew up a practicing Catholic and studied in Lima. He came across a treatise written two centuries earlier by Pablo de Santa María, the rabbi who became bishop of Burgos, to prove the truth of Christianity, and it had the opposite effect on him.

His father, before his death, taught his son what he remembered. Francisco set up as a surgeon in Chile and married. Eventually he tried to bring his sister over to their father’s faith. His sister was appalled and told her confessor, who instructed her to report him.

He was arrested in 1627, leaving a pregnant wife, and shipped up the coast to Lima. At his first hearing, he was told to swear on the cross, and he refused, saying he would swear by the living God of Israel. He told the inquisitors that he was a Jew, as his father had been, and meant to die one. In his cell, he circumcised himself.

He let his hair and beard grow and signed his papers Eli the Nazarite, unworthy servant of the God of Israel. The tribunal sent theologians to argue with him, and over the years they held some 15 formal disputations. He asked for more. He saved the husks from his maize ration, plaited them into a rope, and used it to get out through the window of his cell and reach other prisoners, urging the men arrested in the great conspiracy to hold to their faith.

From scraps of paper, he made up two books of more than 100 leaves each. His ink was charcoal. His pen was cut from a chicken bone with a blade he had fashioned from a nail, and the inquisitors who examined the books remarked that the lettering looked as if it had been printed. The auto took place on the 23rd of January 1639 and was the largest the tribunal of Lima ever held.

11 people were given to the fire. Manuel Bautista Pérez heard his sentence calmly and, by the official account, embraced his brother-in-law who was condemned with him. At the stake he told the executioner to do his work. Having confessed nothing, he was burned alive.

Maldonado da Silva was brought out with his two books hung around his neck. The official account says that as the sentences ended, a sudden gale tore away the awning over the scaffold. He looked up and said, The God of Israel has done this to look on me face to face. He was burned alive with the books.

Spain produced a comparable case in the same years. Lope de Vera was an old Christian gentleman with no Jewish ancestry, a student of Hebrew at Salamanca, whose studies persuaded him that Judaism was true. He was arrested in 1639 after a denunciation in which his own brother took part. In his cell, he circumcised himself with a bone and took the name Judah the Believer.

Five years of argument from theologians did not move him. He was burned alive at Valladolid in July of 1644, and witnesses said that he recited psalms in the fire. One of the inquisitors wrote to a correspondent that he had never seen such firmness as this young man displayed. In Spain itself, the great public autos had grown rarer as the century went on, mainly on grounds of cost.

In 1680, the court decided on another. King Charles II was 18 and had recently married a French princess, and an auto general was held in the capital in the months after the wedding. Prisoners were brought in from tribunals across Spain. The staging was supervised by a familiar of the Inquisition called José del Olmo, who also wrote the official account.

The theater in the Plaza Mayor went up in a matter of days, a platform some 190 feet long with stairways, pulpits, an altar, enclosures for the prisoners, and rooms where the inquisitors could take refreshment. On the 30th of June, the procession entered the square at 7 in the morning with 118 prisoners, effigies included. About 20 people were condemned to death that day, most of them conversos of Portuguese background convicted of Judaizing, and several were women. The burning place had been built outside the Fuencarral gate, a platform 60 feet square and 7 feet high with 20 stakes.

Those who repented were garroted. Those who refused were burned alive, and Olmo mentions that some threw themselves into the flames. The cruelest of the late autos took place on an island. The descendants of the converted Jews of Majorca lived close together in a few streets in the center of Palma, around the street of the silversmiths, and worked mostly as jewelers and shopkeepers.

Islanders called them xuetes, a word of disputed origin that many connect with the word for pork. In the 1670s, the Inquisition arrested more than 200 of them. Nobody was executed on that occasion. They confessed and were reconciled, and their property was confiscated, a seizure that historians count among the largest in the tribunal’s history.

They came out of prison poor and under the standing threat that a second offense meant death. Some continued as before. In 1688, an informer went to the tribunal, and a group decided to flee. They arranged passage on an English ship in the harbor.

On the 7th of March, a party of them went aboard with their children. A storm kept the ship in port. They gave up and went home and were arrested. They were held for 3 years.

Four autos followed in 1691 within a few months. 88 people were sentenced, and 37 were put to death. The burnings were held outside the city near the shore below Bellver Castle, and the crowd is said to have numbered 30,000. 34 of the condemned repented and were strangled before burning.

Three refused. They were Rafael Valls, a man of about 50 who was the group’s religious guide, and a sister and brother, Catalina Tarongí, in her 40s, and Rafael Bonet Tarongí, who was about 21. A Jesuit theologian named Francisco Garau attended and published a book about the autos that same year under the title The Faith Triumphant. Of Valls, Garau writes that he was a statue until the smoke reached him.

When the flame arrived, he defended himself, covered himself, and struggled as he could until he could do no more. He was fat as a suckling pig, Garau continues, and he caught fire inside in such a way that even when the flames were not reaching him, his flesh burned like a brand and, bursting open in the middle, his entrails fell out. Catalina Tarongí had said in prison that she would throw herself into the fire. By the reports, when the flames reached her, she cried out to be saved from them and still would not pronounce the name of Jesus.

Her brother fought his bonds until he broke them and fell into the fire. Garau was a professor of theology, and his book was printed with the approval of the island’s censors. Majorcans sang ballads about that day for generations. For the next two and a half centuries, Majorcans who bore one of the xueta surnames were kept out of the guilds, the army, the priesthood, and public office, no matter how observant they were as Catholics, and other islanders would not marry them.

Royal decrees in the 1780s ordered an end to the discrimination and had little effect. Books were one reason people spent their lives being careful. In 1558, during the Protestant alarm, a royal decree made it a capital offense to import books without a license or to print them without approval. The following year, the Inquisitor General issued the first large Spanish index of forbidden books.

It banned the Bible in the languages ordinary people spoke, along with many works of Erasmus and a good deal of devotional writing. Bookshops were inspected, and ships were boarded in port and searched for printed matter. Works that escaped a ban could come back from the censors with passages inked out, and later indexes listed, page by page, the lines to be struck from otherwise permitted books. Ancestry was harder to escape than books.

From the late 15th century, one Spanish institution after another adopted statutes of purity of blood. A candidate had to prove that he had no Jewish or Moorish ancestor and no relative punished by the Holy Office. Investigators went to the ancestral village to question the oldest inhabitants under oath, and the labeled canvases in the parish church were evidence. A sentence from the early 1500s could block a career two centuries later.

In Seville, men known as linajudos made a business of genealogical knowledge and could be paid to keep quiet. When the painter Diego Velázquez sought a knighthood in the Order of Santiago in the 1650s, investigators questioned well over a hundred witnesses about his ancestry. Manuscripts circulated listing the converso ancestors of noble houses. The best known was written in 1560 by a cardinal whose relative had been refused a knighthood.

He presented the king with a memorandum arguing that most of the high nobility of Spain had converso blood, and it was copied for centuries under the title The Brand on the Nobility. Proof of pure blood was still required for entry to the army’s officer class until 1865. The question of how many people the Inquisition killed has several answers, and each rests on a different body of evidence. One later historian, working from the archives, published a grand total in 1817.

He gave 31,912 people burned in person, 17,659 burned in effigy, and 291,450 punished in other ways. He reached those numbers largely by taking figures from a few documented years and extending them across all tribunals and decades. A later American historian considered the method arbitrary and declined to offer a total of his own. In the 1970s, two scholars went through the annual case summaries that each tribunal sent to the Suprema.

For the years 1540 to 1700 they counted 44,674 cases, in which 826 people were executed in person and 778 in effigy, under two in every hundred. The series has gaps, and it does not cover the first 60 years, which all sources agree were the bloodiest. For that early period, when nearly everyone tried was a converso, one modern estimate suggests about 2,000 executions, and other scholars go higher. Most historians now place the total put to death across the three and a half centuries somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000, out of perhaps 150,000 people tried.

Behind the executed stand the larger numbers who were flogged, sent to the galleys, imprisoned, made to wear the robe, and stripped of their property, and the descendants who inherited the disqualification. The tribunal wound down slowly. The first Bourbon king, Philip V, arriving from France in 1701, was offered an auto in his honor and declined to attend. His reign nevertheless saw a last large wave of prosecutions.

A secret synagogue of some 20 families was discovered in Madrid in 1720. Over the next several years, the tribunals held more than 60 autos and burned about 75 people for Jewish practices. After the 1730s, executions became rare. The Holy Office occupied itself with Freemasons and French books.

It could still break a man. In 1778, it made an example of Pablo de Olavide, a Peruvian-born reformer who had governed Seville and settled the empty hills of the Sierra Morena with thousands of German colonists. A German friar attached to the colonies denounced him for owning forbidden books and for irreligious talk. Olavide spent 2 years in the secret prison.

Some 60 prominent men of Madrid, several of them his friends and fellow reformers, were summoned to a private ceremony behind closed doors. He was brought in wearing the penitential robe and carrying an unlit candle. The recital of his offenses lasted more than 3 hours. When the clerk declared him a formal heretic, he is said to have cried out, No, not that, and to have collapsed from his bench.

He was sentenced to 8 years of confinement in a monastery and the loss of his property, and his descendants were disqualified from office to the fifth generation. He escaped to France 2 years later and died in Spain in 1803. Three years later at Seville, the Inquisition carried out its last execution for heresy under its own authority. María de los Dolores López had been blind since childhood.

At 12, she had left home to live with her confessor, and she later acquired a reputation in the city as a holy woman. She said that she spoke with the Virgin and with her guardian angel, that the infant Jesus had married her in heaven, and that she had released millions of souls from purgatory. The tribunal arrested her in 1779 and spent 2 years sending clergy to persuade her to retract, which she refused to do. On the 24th of August 1781, she was taken to the auto gagged, in the painted robe and cone hat, and heard her sentence, to be burned alive.

On the way to the burning ground, her resolve failed. She wept, asked for a priest, and made a long confession. The executioner strangled her, and her body was burned. Napoleon abolished the Inquisition by decree in December of 1808 when his army took Madrid.

His brother Joseph, installed as king, gave custody of the archives to Juan Antonio Llorente, a canon who had been secretary to the Madrid tribunal. Llorente worked in them for several years. He admits that he had a large quantity of the trial records burned, keeping what he judged historically valuable. The first historian of the archive was also the man who destroyed part of it.

When the French were driven out, he went to Paris with his notes and wrote the history that fixed the Inquisition’s reputation across Europe. The patriotic Parliament at Cádiz abolished the tribunal a second time in 1813. Its decree was ordered to be announced in the parish churches, and it directed that the pictures and inscriptions recording the Inquisition’s punishments be taken down from church walls. King Ferdinand VII returned from exile the next year and restored it.

In March of 1820, an army revolt forced a constitution on the king, and crowds broke into the Inquisition’s buildings in Madrid and several other cities. They found few prisoners and a great deal of paper, much of which was thrown out and burned. One of the tribunal’s last acts in Mexico City, in 1815, was the trial of José María Morelos, the priest who commanded the independence movement. He was condemned as a heretic in a closed ceremony, stripped of his orders, and handed to the army, which shot him.

Ferdinand recovered absolute power 3 years later with French military help but did not formally revive the Holy Office. Several bishops set up diocesan tribunals of their own called juntas of the faith, which followed the old procedures. One of these was responsible for the last death. Cayetano Ripoll was a schoolmaster at Ruzafa, a village on the edge of Valencia.

He had fought against Napoleon as a young man and been held prisoner in France, where he adopted deist views. By the accounts of people who knew him, he was a poor and charitable man. In 1824, he was denounced. He did not take his pupils to mass.

He had taught the children to say Praise be to God in place of the customary Hail, purest Mary, and had told them that salvation required only keeping the commandments. He was held for nearly 2 years. Theologians visited him, and he heard them out and said he could not change his mind. The junta of the faith condemned him as an obstinate heretic and asked the civil court to have him burned.

The civil judges altered the sentence to hanging, with the burning to be represented symbolically. At the end of July 1826, Ripoll was hanged in the market square of Valencia. His last words are given as, I die reconciled with God and with man. His body was placed in a barrel painted with flames and buried in unconsecrated ground.

Newspapers across Europe carried the case, and it drew protests, including from governments friendly to Ferdinand. Ripoll is generally counted as the last person executed in Spain for heresy. Ferdinand died in 1833. On the 15th of July 1834, his widow María Cristina, regent for their young daughter, signed the decree suppressing the tribunal of the Holy Office for good.

356 years after the pope’s bull, the tribunal’s property was assigned to paying down the national debt. The surviving records, tens of thousands of trial files and the correspondence of the Suprema, passed to the state archives. Two years afterward, during the state’s closure and sale of the monasteries, Torquemada’s tomb in the chapel of Santo Tomás at Ávila was broken open. His bones are said to have been taken out and burned.

Who did it is not recorded. On Majorca, the 15 surnames outlasted the tribunal. The decree of expulsion was formally declared void in 1968. In 1992, 500 years after it was signed, King Juan Carlos attended a service at the synagogue in Madrid and spoke of the injustices of the past.

In 2011, the president of the Balearic Islands held a ceremony acknowledging what had been done in 1691, with descendants of the Valls and Tarongí families present, and said that the gathering was meant to recognize a grave injustice done to Majorcans who were condemned for their beliefs. Seven years afterward, the city of Palma placed a plaque in the square that now covers the burning ground in memory of the 37. In 2015, Spain passed a law offering citizenship to anyone who could show descent from the Jews expelled in 1492. More than 130,000 people applied, from Turkey and Morocco to Latin America.

Tracing a family back five centuries is difficult, and some of the genealogists who worked on those applications drew on the archives of the Inquisition, where a notary had written down a prisoner’s name, the street where she lived, and the names of her parents and grandparents.