For three and a half centuries the mere name of the Spanish Inquisition was enough to chill the blood. Founded in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs, it pursued conversos and heretics, witches and readers of forbidden books, through secret trials and public autos-da-fé. Modern historians estimate tens of thousands of trials and thousands of executions.
On 15 July 1834, by a decree signed by the regent Maria Christina, the institution was abolished forever. It did not fall to a sudden stirring of conscience: it was by then a relic, hollowed out by Enlightenment ideas and the Napoleonic wars. But the date remains symbolic — the day Europe officially closed the longest-lived tribunal of the faith.
The memory of the trials
Paradoxically, the Inquisition's own archives are today a goldmine for scholars of magic and witchcraft: every trial recorded with obsessive care the spells, amulets, divinations and dreams of the accused. The tribunal that sought to erase the occult became, despite itself, its greatest archivist.