On 8/7/2021 1:45 AM, gggg gggg wrote:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Sandbox/HistoricalVillainUpgradeAnalysis
the source claims:
Despite its infamy, The Spanish Inquisition actually killed
remarkably few people. The latest archival research suggests
about 3,000 executions over the course of over 300 years. This
was partly because the standard of proof required to convict
someone was actually very high, and innocence was usually presumed.
While killing people because of their religious beliefs is
undoubtedly bad, Spain had among the lowest amounts of religious
violence; witchcraft executions in the rest of Europe alone
utterly dwarfed the Inquisition's death toll by orders of magnitude,
note much less the big meaty events like the French Wars of Religion.
Other "Common Knowledge" about the Inquisition (that they burned
books, that the auto de fe involved torture rather than simply being
a public penance, that people were burned for being witches, that
final authority rested with inquisitors rather than the secular
government) is simply from the realm of pure fantasy. Again, its
reputation is more the result of English and Dutch media dominance
(the two countries were bitter rivals of Spain in the early modern
period) than anything real.
I'd guess the moral of their argument is,
when you take about 10 people a year out
to the town square, tie them to a stake,
and burn them horribly alive (to death),
and continue this for around 300 years,
,,,,
it leaves an 'infamous' or lasting imprint on people's memories!
-------------------
from
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheSpanishInquisition
----
Historians now estimate that of all trials only two percent may have
actually ended with execution. A study of the timeframe 1540 to 1700
found documents for 44,674 cases with roughly 1500 death sentences.
Furthermore as trials tended to be lengthy and wardens poor a surprising
number of the sentenced managed to flee the country and so the sentences resulted in 826 executions in persona, i.e. burning the heretic, and 778
in effigie, i.e. burning a strawman because the convict was unavailable. Estimates for the total number of executions in persona range between
1000 and 1500.
----
One of the main reasons for the villain status of the Inquisition: Their
host country was nearly continually at war with primarily Protestant
nations such as England and the Netherlands, where there was more
freedom of speech (for its time) while printing presses and popular
literature were much more common. This meant that at the beginning they criticized the Spanish Inquisition's poor job on executions and
conversions. When the Inquisition became a bit harsher, they went
apeshit and exaggerated its reputation of being a blood-thirsty
totalitarian organization. Then the Spanish Empire lost ground to the
British Empire, France, its former South American colonies and the USA -
the result of this meant that this demonization was immortalized as the
"Black Legend."
Protestant Nations themselves executed witches and dissidents en masse,
so their criticism was mostly just propaganda against their religious opponents, with each side considering the other heretics. And then
atheist writers started to put pens to paper and, well...
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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