During the dark days of the Inquisition, they’d just torture everyone until they confessed to terrible crimes.
What we do today is different. But not that much.
It is to the same end. They just go about reaching it differently today.
“What we do today is different. But not that much.”...………
Simple to understand, it’s the end result that counts.
The Inquisition was not that cruel, or stupid.
They rarely tortured, and other than in a few cases where procedure was not followed, they were sticklers for due process.
This was a unique thing in sixteenth-seventeenth century Europe. The results are evident in, for instance, the rates of execution for religious crimes, such as witchcraft. Spain executed few witches over the period 1500-1700, a couple of dozen or so, compared to tens of thousands in Germany, and thousands in France and England. And it is a similar case in the body count for heretics and religious dissenters.
The Spanish Inquisition can be considered, above all, as an official brake on the tendency to official violence in a cruel age. The body counts are proof.
Much of the reputation of the Spanish Inquisition is the fallout of two centuries of official English and Continental Protestant propaganda during the great ideological conflicts of the Reformation, and moreover the great colonial-commercial rivalry between England and Spain. In Spanish historiography there is a term for this, the “leyenda negra”, the black legend.