Luna del'Corvo

On, and glad you liked it! LOL Two things to consider vis a vis the Inquisition: With regard to torture; yes, they used torture. However, at that time, civil courts used torture as a matter of course, and the Church's limits on how much, how often were quite a bit tighter (initially at least; the Spanish Inquisition got out of hand by even the Vatican's own reckoning at the time) than those of the secular authority. Also, the percent of accused that were executed in the Inquisitorial courts was actually lower than any secular court of the time (inasmuch as we have records for each, naturally).

Secondly, without defending the idea of trying and executing anyone over religion, it is the case that even the Spanish Inquisition accounted for far fewer deaths than is commonly thought. Much or our 'popular' idea of the inquisition is based first on the protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Reformation era (whose own records on dealing with dissenters is far from sterling) and Enlightenment historiographical tradition which was (laudably, if at times inaccurately) anti-religion. All of this was then picked up by the Romantic and Gothic literary traditions, which gave us many a fictional account of the virginal girl being subjected to unspeakable and lurid depravity at the hands of the cowled inquisitor....

So while it was by no means a good thing, it was never quite the bloodbath is has been supposed to be, and contextually speaking, was not at all outside the normal level of brutality or repressiveness of the time period. I tend to be pretty passionate about this point, because I think we are heading into a new sort of 'neo-medievalism' at the hands of the GOP/RR, and unless we know how these things really happened, and what they were and were not, they could happen again....