Liam Brockey, currently assistant professor of history at Princeton University, will become an associate professor of history at Michigan State in the fall. He is the editor of Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World (Ashgate: 2008).

As a troupe of wise men once said, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Regrettably, that is no longer the case. The recent flood tide of commentary about the so-called Torture Memos has brought on a torrent of comparisons to the Inquisition, a church court that operated from the late fifteenth until the early nineteenth century with varying degrees of activity.

Seeking to offer valid comparisons with the horrors of the past, journalists and other commentators have conjured the ghost of the “Spanish Inquisition” as a standard for despotic depravity. The invocation of this ecclesiastical tribunal is typically followed by fleeting references to the more notorious governments of the twentieth century. While the terror provoked by the Inquisition over the three centuries of its existence is beyond dispute, the Holy Office (as it was known to contemporaries) is surely out of its league in this company. Indeed, its popular reputation and its presence in current debates owe more to the gothic imagination of the nineteenth century than to the study of its history. The use of comparisons that are inappropriate because they ignore the historical specificity of any past institution or event does a great disservice to our political culture. The appeal made by mentioning the Inquisition is based on caricature rather than fact, and its inaccuracy cheapens the debate.

The popular image of the Inquisition—despite the best efforts of Mel Brooks and Monty Python—is no laughing matter. It is the legacy of a distinct political climate which combined shades of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment to justify the presumably more enlightened political and religious attitudes of the French, English, and Americans. Central to that vision of the Inquisition was the question of torture, a barbaric practice that the new progressive regimes in those lands would, of course, never countenance—regardless of their own histories of witch hunts and anti-Semitism. Other hallmarks of the Inquisition, such as its absolute secrecy and the religious criteria for its judgments, also contributed to its nefarious image.

If we are to reflect on the issue of torture and, more specifically, on how and why torture was used by the Inquisition five hundred years ago, some preliminary considerations are in order. The Holy Office was an ecclesiastical court, conceived in the late 1470s, which was run by churchmen for the express purpose of prosecuting heresy and other crimes against contemporary Christian beliefs and practices. After an initial thirty-year period of great activity (by fifteenth century standards) in which it moved from town to town seeking out Crypto-Jews and blasphemers, the Inquisition became a settled, urban tribunal. Its procedures were marked by formality and legalism, with the ultimate stated goal of rooting out heterodoxy. Ironically, it was the court’s strict adherence to its rules of operation and, in particular, its obsession with record-keeping that ensured that its catalogue of horrors would be preserved for posterity.

The rules for the use of torture, the instances when it was applied, and the results of its use are clearly described in Inquisition records. Indeed, the technique known as waterboarding is presented in graphic detail in many trial reports. One such case from the spring of 1494 relates how a particularly recalcitrant woman in Toledo refused to confess to the accusations of “judaizing” that had been brought against her. The inquisitors considered that she was a Christian in name only, since several people had witnessed her “reversion” to the Jewish practices of her ancestors, and so decided to force a confession through torture. Six legal experts, all duly identified, concurred that this was the correct procedure. And so Marina González was stripped, tied to a rack, and “with a jar that held three pints, more or less, they started to pour water down her nose and throat.” After each pint was poured, she was asked to confess. González reportedly held out for the whole jar, and only began to confess to performing Jewish rituals when she was lowered once again into position for further torture.

The use of torture by the Inquisition was never without deliberation. There was no urgency to defuse ticking time-bombs; rather, torture was applied during judicial procedures in cases where the accused did not confess to his or her misdeeds in spite of what was considered to be strong evidence. Aside from potentially securing denunciations, torture was meant primarily for producing confessions, not “intelligence.” The rules drawn up by the Holy Office imposed strict limits and procedural requirements on the use of torture. One compendium of rules published by the Royal Press in Madrid in 1630 lays out the prolonged deliberations necessary for resorting to torture. Confessions secured as a result of torture, the rules insist, must be repeated in full two to three days afterwards. Moreover, these rules state that the inquisitors who issued the order to proceed with torture must be present during its application. Even the torturer is supposed to be “a man who would not be expected to do something he shouldn’t out of hatred, affection, or self-interest.” Nevertheless, while these rules insisted that the option to apply torture could only be used once, trial records state that inquisitors would “suspend” the torture sessions so that they could be resumed indefinitely.

Inquisition records have revealed a wealth of information about the lives of people of the past in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Iberian empires in the Americas and Asia. Historians have mined their archival riches for details about politics, culture, and religion hundreds of years ago. In other words, those records contain rare echoes of the voices of the past, on either side of the law of their day. We should not forget, however, that the Holy Office was an institution that existed at the dawn of the modern era—and was extinguished by Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians as their history entered its modern phase. Serious historians have analyzed it according to the standards of its time, not of ours. Dispassionately, they have revealed the Inquisition as the product of an age when anxiety about religious conformity and orthodoxy weighed heavily on the minds of monarchs. Those kings and princes did not swear to defend a constitution, to abide by international conventions, or to defend human rights; a different legal and moral vocabulary guided their actions.

So there is no need to invoke the “Spanish Inquisition” to refer to the barbarity of our age. If there is a pressing need to find analogies for the abuses committed by Americans in the name of hunting terrorists, the recent past offers an ample selection. Without the hazy remoteness of distant realities such as the Holy Office, the indictments to be made as a result of accurate comparisons will be all the more grave. To be sure, the industrial age raised the bar for brutality to levels that would have made inquisitors blanch. If we are serious about understanding what recently went wrong in our midst, hard as it may be for us to swallow, we are far better served by references to recent events, since these remind us of the moral lessons that we should already have learned from our own experiences.