Tomas de Torquemada: The Grand Inquisitor
An utterly evil man who was convinced that he was doing God’s work by persecuting Jews
16th September 1498 was the day on which died one of the evilest men ever to have lived. However, like many such people, he was utterly convinced that he was on the side of justice and was doing “God’s will”. It is amazing how religious zeal can persuade some people to act in the most unspeakably cruel and villainous ways.
The man in question was Tomas de Torquemada, a Dominican monk who, in 1483, had been entrusted by Pope Sixtus IV to lead the “Holy Inquisition” in Spain. The aim of this institution was to root out heresy from Spain, which Torquemada understood to mean discovering and punishing “Marranos”, Jews who had ostensibly converted to Christianity but who still practised Judaism in secret.
Torquemada took his work extremely seriously, gathering a network of spies and arming himself with “enforcers” in the shape of 50 armed knights and 200-foot soldiers. There was nothing he would not do to extract a confession, followed by punishment. It is true that not every victim was burned at stake — this was the fate of possibly as few as 2,000 discovered Jews — but at least 25,000 others received less severe punishments after they had been tortured into confession.
