And this is exculpating how? Because it characterizes the "several thousand" who were burned (not to mentioned tortured) for "Judaizing practices" as "not very large" numbers?
Several thousand sounds like a large number to me, considering what happened to them. Visualize several thousand individuals screaming under torture, as they died. Visualize "the whole family of the philosopher and humanist Juan Luis Vives" screaming as they died. And of course "many more thousands of conversos escaped similar fates only by fleeing the country."
You evidently want to be sure we don't think of it as genocide or extermination. Okay, it wasn't genocide or extermination.
It was just killing, hideously, thousands of Jews, many fewer than they wanted to kill (because thousands fled), and it was simply Isabella's "pious duty," she felt, to expel 170,000 of her citizens who refused to convert to her religion, Christianity.
From your link:
The Supreme Council of the Inquisition (or Suprema) was the only formal institution set up by the Catholic Monarchs for all their kingdoms together. Nevertheless, they thought of it primarily in religious and not in political terms...
The Inquisition's secret procedures, its eagerness to accept denunciations, its use of torture, the absence of counsel for the accused, the lack of any right to confront hostile witnesses, and the practice of confiscating the property of those who were condemned and sharing it between the Inquisition, the crown, and the accusers--all this inspired great terror, as indeed it was meant to do. |
