Inquisition: The Reign of Fear, by Toby Green

The crimes of the Spanish Inquisition, carried out over three centuries from 1478 onwards in the name of God and of the purity of the Catholic Church, are legendary, if only thanks to the efforts of Monty Python's Flying Circus and its running gag "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition". In dustier academic circles, the exact number of its victims, burnt at the stake after undergoing horrific torture, remain a matter of debate but - parodies aside - it is safe to say they ran into six figures.

The obvious question that arises from Toby Green's masterful account of arguably the longest running reign of terror in human history, is why didn't anyone put a stop to it? It took an outsider, Napoleon Bonaparte, to sweep it away in 1808 when he deposed the Spanish king. Otherwise, you can't help thinking, the Spanish might still be allowing themselves to suffer its brutality and injustice to this day.

Green quotes in this regard Hugh Trevor-Roper: "Without the tribunes of the people, social persecution cannot be organised." So why did the Spanish, along with their near neighbours and sometime rivals the Portuguese, not to mention their millions of subjects in "New World" colonies, put up with the Inquisition for so long when its abuses and sheer perverse inhumanity were so plain to see and - in its random application - a threat to every single one of them, no matter how devout?

The answer, Green concludes, lies in the social tensions and particular history of the Iberian peninsula in this period, and in the political and popular mentality they gave rise to - echoes of which he feels may linger on there to this day. To support this claim, he follows the Spanish Inquisition from cradle to grave, providing an account that is rich in detail and individual cases, broad in scope, taking in the export of torture, paranoia and hypocrisy to the burgeoning colonial empire, and firmly rooted in a clear account of Spain's place in European history. This cocktail suggests a great deal of information and Green's book indeed comes in at just short of 500 pages, but he has a knack in switching the narrative from examples, to analysis and on to politics and back again in such a way that the book retains a strong forward thrust that carries you through its bulk.

He is careful at the outset to distinguish between the Spanish (and Portuguese) Inquisition, and those that preyed on the rest of Europe in medieval times. These latter were run by the church, with the tacit approval of the secular authorities. In the case of the Spanish Inquisition, it was the crown that was in charge, with the Vatican on many occasions, noted by Green, making pleas for clemency and restraint that too often fell on deaf royal ears.

The Spanish Inquisition was an instrument of national policy. It aimed to instill a national identity out of the fragmented inheritance of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Reyes Catolicos who forged a united Spain out of competing kingdoms and the push to drive Islam from continental Europe that triumphed with victory at Granada in 1492. By making into an enemy within those who were judged different, the rest of society could, the monarchy decided, be made more cohesive.

The Inquisition's first target was the conversos - mainly Jews who had converted to Christianity but who in this fevered witchhunt were judged to be insufficiently devoted to their new faith. The fact that prominent conversos were among Christopher Columbus's high command when he claimed the New World for Spain in 1492 should, in any rational society, have given the lie to accusations of lack of patriotism, but they didn't. Instead their presence only encouraged the Inquisition to spread its tentacles to the colonies.

And - rather like the famous Pastor Martin Niemoller remark reproduced on the frontispiece - after they came for the conversos and no one spoke out, the Inquisition then came for the moriscos, those with Muslim ancestry. And then anyone who stood out from the crowd. Finally, no one was safe. In 1559, for instance, a case for heresy was begun against the Archbishop of Toledo, Bartolome Carranza, hitherto a vigorous Inquisitor. His crime was to fall out with one of his rivals.

Taken on their own, the cases of individuals caught in the Inquisition's net simply beggar belief and feed into the fashionable maxim that all organised religion only brings misery and suffering. There was, for instance, the Inquisition's policy of treating both perpetrator and victim of gay rape as equally culpable. When an Angolan slave called Joseph was raped by his master in the Brazilian city of Bahia in 1703, he was tried by the Portuguese colonial inquisitors, convicted, whipped and sentenced to five years in the galleys.

If there was no moral compass in the judgements of the Inquisition, its methods of extracting "confessions" can only be described as the product of twisted minds. Prisoners' hands would be tied behind their back; they would be hoisted from the floor and kept suspended for hours or even days at the inquisitors' pleasure, like slaughtered rabbits hung out to dry. Or they would be strapped to a potro - trestle table - with their feet higher than their head, and water forced down their throats.

This was the worst of religion, utterly corrupted for political and personal gain, and run by individuals who for all their outward piety were clearly unaffected by the teachings of the faith they so flamboyantly proclaimed. That the Spanish Inquisition should be counted as one of the great crimes of organised religion against humanity has some truth in it. But as Toby Green convincingly shows, part of the guilt too is shared with political processes and territorial ambitions that are resolutely secular in their totalitarian bent, and with the cynical exploitation of the seemingly universal human instinct to scapegoat.

Peter Stanford's 'The Devil: A Biography' is published in paperback by Arrow

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