HISTORIA DESCONOCIDA DE LA INQUISICION PROTESTANTE

For centuries, it has been repeated that the Spanish Inquisition was a cruel and ruthless tribunal that left tens of thousands of victims. This book demonstrates that this fallacy is, in fact, the greatest propaganda success in modern history. José Luis Pozo Fajarnés traces the inquisitorial mechanisms that operated for more than three centuries in the territories where the misnamed Protestant Reformation triumphed: the systematic persecution of Catholics in Tudor and Stuart England, Calvin's burnings at the stake in Geneva, the witch hunts that ravaged Germany, Scotland, and New England, and the Lutheran pogroms against Jewish communities that the Spanish Inquisition, paradoxically, would not have tolerated. A decentralized Inquisition with no records--deliberately destroyed--which made it more lethal and also more invisible. In contrast to that undocumented violence, the Spanish Inquisition also emerges in these pages as what the archives show it to have been: a tribunal with codified legal procedures, procedural safeguards unknown in other territories, and a number of executions--around three thousand over three and a half centuries--that stands in stark contrast to the tens of thousands of victims of Protestant witch-hunts. A comparative history essay that does not rehabilitate what deserves criticism and that holds each institution accountable for its actual crimes. With abundant documentation, primary sources, and critical bibliography, this work does not seek to deny errors or abuses, but rather to restore historical balance and unmask a "black legend" constructed from Protestant propaganda and uncritically accepted by contemporary culture. In 1645, Matthew Hopkins roamed the counties of eastern England in search of witches. In less than two years, and with the backing of the Puritan Parliament, he sent more people to the gallows than had been executed for witchcraft in England during the previous century. They called him the Witchfinder General.