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THE INQUISITION OF SPAIN

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE AGES. In three volumes, octavo.

A HISTORY OF AURICULAR CONFESSION AND INDULGENCES IN THE LATIN CHURCH. In three volumes, octavo.

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF SACERDOTAL CELIBACY IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Third edition. (In preparation.)

A FORMULARY OF THE PAPAL PENITENTIARY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. One volume, octavo. (Out of

print.)

SUPERSTITION AND FORCE. Essays on The Wager of Law, The Wager of Battle, The Ordeal, Torture. Fourth edition, revised. In one volume, 12mo.

STUDIES IN CHURCH HISTORY. The Rise of the Temporal Power, Benefit of Clergy, Excommunication, The Early Church and Slavery. Second edition. In one volume, 12mo. CHAPTERS FROM THE Religious HISTORY OF SPAIN, CONNECTED WITH THE INQUISITION. Censorship of the Press, Mystics and Illuminati, Endemoniadas, El Santo Niño de la Guardia, Brianda de Bardaxí. In one volume, 12mo. THE MORISCOS OF SPAIN, THEIR CONVERSION AND EXPULSION. In one volume, 12mo.

(ii)

OF THE

INQUISITION OF SPAIN

BY

HENRY CHARLES LEA, LL.D.

IN FOUR VOLUMES

VOLUME I.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1906

All rights reserved

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PREFACE.

In the following pages I have sought to trace, from the original sources as far as possible, the character and career of an institution which exercised no small influence on the fate of Spain and even, one may say, indirectly on the civilized world. The material for this is preserved so superabundantly in the immense Spanish archives that no one writer can pretend to exhaust the subject. There can be no finality in a history resting on so vast a mass of inedited documents and I do not flatter myself that I have accomplished such a result, but I am not without hope that what I have drawn from them and from the labors of previous scholars has enabled me to present a fairly accurate survey of one of the most remarkable organizations recorded in human annals.

In this a somewhat minute analysis has seemed to be indispensable of its structure and methods of procedure, of its relations with the other bodies of the State and of its dealings with the various classes subject to its extensive jurisdiction. This has involved the accumulation of much detail in order to present the daily operation of a tribunal of which the real importance is to be sought, not so much in the awful solemnities of the auto de fe, or in the cases of a few celebrated victims, as in the silent influence exercised by its incessant and secret labors among the mass of the people and in the limitations which it placed on the Spanish intellect-in the resolute conservatism with which it held the nation in the medieval groove and unfitted it for the exercise of rational liberty when the nineteenth century brought in the inevitable Revolution.

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