A BBC program refutes the myth of the Holy Office as a paradigm of terror
The sinister torture chambers equipped with toothed wheels, bone-breaking devices, shackles, and other terrifying mechanisms existed only in the imagination of its detractors.
Nevertheless, even today its name is invoked as a synonym for repression, obscurantism, and cruelty. What mechanisms of fate turned the Spanish Inquisition into the most enduring example of terror? The answer, according to the exhaustive data gathered by a new generation of international historians, is simple: the Holy Office faced a gigantic propaganda machine. The effects of the distortion, promoted by the Protestant world thanks to the printing press, have been so lasting that even today the term inquisition or inquisitor is identified with horror, torture, and murder in every language.
It is paradoxical that it should have been the BBC—the British public broadcaster—that undertook the task of reconstructing the image of so Spanish an institution. On Sunday, a prime-time late-night program—Time Watch—showed the true face of a tribunal created by the Catholic Monarchs to fight heresy. Experts of the stature of Henry Kamen, Stephen Haliczer, and the Spanish professors José Álvarez-Junco and Jaime Contreras reconstruct, in the report The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, the true landscape of an institution which, although not defensible in the eyes of the twentieth century, was indeed deliberately distorted.
It was an institution controlled by lawyers reluctant to apply torture, and far less inquisitorial than its counterparts in France, Germany, or England, where, without the need for a specific tribunal, three times as many heretics, witches, or more-or-less eccentric figures were killed. For University of Illinois professor Stephen Haliczer, the Inquisition’s own archives are eloquent: in some 7,000 cases, something resembling torture was applied in barely 2%.
Over 350 years of repressive history, while legend speaks of millions of murders, the real number of victims stands between 5,000 and 7,000 people.
Over the course of fifty minutes, the BBC program, co-produced by the historian and Hispanist Nigel Townson, carries its effort to reconstruct historical truth as far as the figure of Philip II, a true black beast of the international imagination. Philip II’s policy is perfectly open to discussion.
I do not find him particularly likeable—Professor Álvarez-Junco explains in the program—but his son Carlos was simply an adolescent in poor health who died in an accident. Turning him into a champion of freedom, as history has done, into the young liberator of the Netherlands who is murdered by his father, as Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Don Carlos tells it, is one of the most glaring cases of historical injustice.
London.
Author: Lola Galán.
