The Inquisition

Overview

• The Inquisition was a set of judicial institutions of the medieval and early-modern Roman Catholic West, established to investigate and suppress heresy. It belongs to the history of Western Christianity; the Orthodox East had no such institution.

Summary

"The Inquisition" names several distinct Western bodies — the medieval papal inquisition, and later the state-run Spanish inquisition under Ferdinand and Isabella — charged with detecting and punishing heresy through trial, and at times imprisonment, exile, and execution. It is a phenomenon of the Latin Church in alliance with Western states, and the Orthodox Church, which developed no comparable tribunal, is often distinguished from it on precisely this point. Popular memory tends to exaggerate its scale, merging the separate inquisitions together and inflating the numbers put to death; more careful historical study draws finer distinctions between the ecclesiastical and the royal inquisitions and their actual reach. See Secularism.