Historical dossier · 1420 – 1498 (Spain)
Tomás de Torquemada
The Grand Inquisitor
The driving fanatic behind the Spanish Inquisition. Engineered the expulsion, torture, and burning at the stake of thousands in the name of piety and religious conformity.
The historical record
More than the legend
Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican friar, became Spain's first Grand Inquisitor in 1483. He reorganized the Inquisition's tribunals and supported the Alhambra Decree, which ordered Jews to leave Spain or convert. Execution totals vary across sources, but the institution used coercive interrogation and punishment to enforce religious conformity.
A fictional first-person defense
In their own (invented) words
I was not building an apparatus of persecution; I was building a very large filing system for deciding who counted as sufficiently correct. Every tribunal had rules, every rule had a seal, and every seal had a man who could say this was all regrettable but necessary. One does wonder why the paperwork required so many prisons.
This satirical monologue is original fiction, not a historical quotation.
The part the excuses leave out
This invented defense satirizes bureaucratic self-justification. It does not excuse the forced conversions, expulsions, imprisonment, and executions associated with the Inquisition under Torquemada's leadership.