The Spanish Inquisition was a picnic? Too bad you couldn't attend.
The Spanish Inquisition in its worst phase, lasted roughly twenty years, the last two decades of the 15th Century, and was directed mainly at Jewish Christians who were suspected (wrongly) of having remained secret Jews. We associate this period withj Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor at that time. What it did was to commit judicial murder and judical robbery in the name of religious purity but also in the name of political stability. During that time the remaining Jews in Spain were
given the choice of conversion or exile, so that the Jewish community was effectively destroyed. Thereafter the function of the Inquisition, so far as the Jews were concerned, was to certify that no Jewish family would hold a position of importance in the kingdom. Of course as time wore on, many Jewish familes acquired such certificates, and we see the irony of a country devoted to racial purity even though few aristocratic or middle-class families had no Jewish ancestors. The Inquisition paid relatively little attention to Protestantism, at least in Spain. It was its actions in the Spanish Netherlands that excited the attention of the English Protestants. The war with Spain (1588-1604) which wrecked the finances of both England and Spain, made captured English sailors familiar with it, and those who refused to recant, were treated like heretics. Stories of that war made the Inquisition a part of the national imagination, so that it has remained a byeword of torture and horror, even though in fact it was no worse than the English courts of that time.