Inquisition, called also 'the Holy Office,' a tribunal in the Roman Catholic Church for the discovery, repression, and punishment of heresy, unbelief, and other offences against religion. From the very first establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire laws more or less severe existed, as in most of the ancient religions, for the repression and punishment of dissent from the national creed; and the emperors Theodosius and Justinian appointed officials called 'inquisitors,' whose special duty it was to discover and to prosecute before the civil tribunals offences of this class. The ecclesiastical cognisance of heresy and its punishment by spiritual censures belonged to the bishop or the episcopal synod; but no special machinery for the purpose was devised until the spread in the 11th and 12th centuries of certain sects, reputed dangerous alike to the state and to the church—the Cathari, Waldenses, and Albigenses—excited the alarm of the civil as well as of the ecclesiastical authorities. In the then condition of the public mind, however differently it is now constituted, heresy was regarded as a crime against the state, no less than against the church. An extraordinary commission was sent by Pope Innocent III. into the south of France to aid the local authorities in checking the spread of the Albigensian heresy. The fourth Lateran Council (1215) earnestly impressed both on bishops and magistrates the necessity of increased vigilance against heresy; and a council held at Toulouse directed that in each parish the priest and two or three laymen of good repute should be appointed to examine and report to the bishop all such offences discovered within the district.
So far, however, there was no permanent court distinct from those of the bishops; but under Innocent IV., in 1248, a special tribunal for the purpose was instituted, the chief direction of which was vested in the then recently-established Dominican Order. The Inquisition thus constituted became a general instead of as previously a local tribunal; and it was introduced in succession into Italy, Spain, Germany, and the southern provinces of France. So long, moreover, as this constitution remained it must be regarded as a strictly papal tribunal. Accordingly, over the French and German Inquisition of the following century the popes exercised full authority, receiving appeals against the rigour of local tribunals, and censuring or even depriving the inquisitor for undue severity. In France the Inquisition was discontinued under Philip the Fair; and though an attempt was made under Henry II. to revive it against the Huguenots the effort was unsuccessful. In Germany, on the appearance of the Beghards (q.v.) in the beginning of the 14th century, the Inquisition came into active operation, and inquisitors for Germany were named at intervals by various popes, as Urban V., Gregory XI., Boniface IX., Innocent VIII., down to the Reformation, when it fell into disuse. In England it was never received, all the proceedings against heresy being reserved to the ordinary tribunals. In Poland, though established in 1327, it had but a brief existence.
It is the history of the Inquisition as it existed in Spain, Portugal, and their dependencies that has absorbed almost entirely the real interest of this painful subject. As an ordinary tribunal similar to those of other countries it had existed in Spain from an early period. Its functions, however, in these times were little more than nominal; but early in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, in consequence of the alarms created by the alleged discovery of a plot among the Jews and the Jewish converts—who had been required either to emigrate or to conform to Christianity—to overthrow the government, an application was made to the pope, Sixtus IV., to permit its reorganisation (1478); but in reviving the tribunal the crown assumed to itself the right of appointing the inquisitors, and, in truth, of controlling the entire action of the tribunal. From this date forwards Catholic writers regard the Spanish Inquisition as a state-tribunal, a character which is recognised by Ranke, Guizot, Leo, and even the great anti-papal authority Llorente; and in dissociating the church generally and the Roman see itself from that state-tribunal, Catholics refer to the bulls of the pope, Sixtus IV., protesting against it. Notwithstanding this protest, however, the Spanish crown maintained its assumption. Inquisitors were appointed, and in 1483 the tribunal commenced its terrible career under Thomas de Torquemada. The popes, feeling their protest unsuccessful, were compelled from considerations of prudence to tolerate what they were powerless to suppress; but several papal enactments are enumerated by Catholics, the object of which was to control the arbitrary action of the tribunal and to mitigate the rigour and injustice of its proceedings. Unhappily these measures were ineffective to control the fanatical activity of the local judges. The number of victims, as stated by Llorente, the popular historian of the Inquisition, is positively appalling. He affirms that during the sixteen years of Torquemada's tenure of office nearly 9000 were condemned to the flames. The second head of the Inquisition, Diego Deza, in eight years, according to the same writer, put above 1600 to a similar death; and so for the other successive inquisitors-general. But Catholics loudly protest against the credibility of these fearful allegations. It is impossible not to see that Llorente was a violent partisan; and it is alleged that in his work on the Basque Provinces he had already proved himself a venal and unscrupulous fabricator. Although, therefore, he has made it impossible to disprove his accuracy by appealing to the original papers, which he himself destroyed, yet his Catholic critics—as Hefele in his Life of Cardinal Ximenes—have produced from his own work many examples of contradictory and exaggerated statements; Prescott, in his Ferdinand and Isabella (iii. 467-70), has pointed out many similar instances; and Ranke does not hesitate (Fürsten und Völker von Süd-europa, i. 242) to impeach his honesty. Still, with all the deductions which it is possible to make, the working of the Inquisition in Spain and in its dependencies even in the New World involves an amount of cruelty which it is impossible to contemplate without horror. When it was attempted to introduce it into Naples Pope Paul III., in 1546, exhorted the Neapolitans to resist its introduction, 'because it was excessively severe and refused to moderate its rigour by the example of the Roman tribunal' (Llorente, ii. 147). Pius IV. in 1563 addressed a similar exhortation on the same ground to the Milanese (ibid. ii. 237); and even the most bigoted Catholics unanimously confess and repudiate the barbarities which dishonoured religion by assuming its semblance and its name.
The procedure of the Inquisition deserves a brief notice. The party, if suspected of heresy, or denounced as guilty, was liable to be arrested and detained in prison, only to be brought to trial when it might seem fit to his judges. The proceedings were conducted secretly. He was not confronted with his accusers, nor were their names even then made known to him. The evidence of an accomplice was admissible, and the accused himself was liable to be put to the torture in order to extort a confession of his guilt. The punishments to which, if found guilty, he was liable were death by fire, as exemplified in the terrible Auto da Fé (q.v.), or on the scaffold, imprisonment in the galleys for life or for a limited period, forfeiture of property, civil infamy, and, in minor cases, retraction and public penance. It is fair to recollect that some of the usages were but the ordinary procedures in all the courts of the age, whether civil or ecclesiastical.
The rigour of the Spanish Inquisition abated in the later part of the 17th century. In the reign of Charles III. it was forbidden to punish capitally without the royal warrant; and in 1770 the royal authority was required as a condition even for an arrest. From 1808, under King Joseph Bonaparte, the Inquisition was suppressed until the Restoration; it was again suppressed on the establishment of the constitution of 1820; but it was partially restored in 1825; nor was it till 1834 and 1835 that it was finally abolished in Spain, its property being applied to the liquidation of the national debt.
The Inquisition was established in Portugal in 1557, and its jurisdiction was extended to the Portuguese colonies in India. The rigour of its processes, however, was much mitigated in the 18th century, and under John VI. it fell altogether into disuse.
The Inquisition in Rome and the Papal States never ceased, from the time of its establishment, to exercise a severe and watchful control over heresy, or the suspicion of heresy, which offence was punished by imprisonment and civil disabilities; but of capital sentences for heresy the history of the Roman Inquisition presents few instances, and, according to Balmez (On Civilisation, p. 156), that tribunal 'has never been known to order the execution of a capital sentence' for the crime of heresy. The tribunal still exists under the direction of a congregation, but its action is confined to the examination of books and the trial of ecclesiastical offences and questions of church law; and since the Italian occupation of Rome in 1870 its supreme jurisdiction is limited to the Vatican.
See Llorente's Istoria Critica de la Inquisicion (Fr. trans. 4 vols. 1817); Comte Joseph de Maistre's Letters on the Spanish Inquisition (Eng. trans. 1851); Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella; Motley's works; Hefele's Cardinal Ximenes; Balmez, Catholicism and Protestantism; Hoffman, Geschichte der Inquisition (1878); Molinier, L'Inquisition dans le midi de la France au XIII. et au XIV. Siècle (1880); H. C. Lea's History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (3 vols. 1888).