The Inquisition In The Spanish Dependencies

Author : Henry Charles Lea
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331923787
Total Pages : 584 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (237 download)

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Download or read book The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies written by Henry Charles Lea and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies: Sicily Naples Sardinia Milan the Canaries Mexico Peru New Granada The scope of my History of the Spanish Inquisition precluded a detailed investigation into the careers of individual tribunals. Such an investigation, however, is not without interest, especially with respect to the outlying ones, which were subjected to varying influences and reacted in varying ways on the peoples among whom they were established. Moreover, in some cases, this affords us an inside view of inquisitorial life, of the characters of those to whom were confided the awful irresponsible powers of the Holy Office and of the abuse of those powers by officials whom distance removed from the immediate supervision of the central authority, suggesting a capacity for evil even greater than that manifested in the Peninsula. This is especially the case with the tribunals of the American Colonies, of which, thanks to the unwearied researches of Don Jose Toribio Medina, of Santiago de Chile, a fairly complete and minute account can be given, based on the confidential correspondence of the local officials with the Supreme Council and the reports of the visitadores or inspectors, who were occasionally sent in the vain expectation of reducing them to order. While thus in the colonial tribunals we see the Inquisition at its worst, as a portion of the governmental system, we can realize how potent was its influence in contributing to the failure of Spanish colonial policy, by preventing orderly and settled administration and by exciting disaffection which the Council of Indies more than once warned the crown would lead to the loss of its transatlantic empire. It is perhaps not too much to say that these revelations moreover go far to explain the influences which so long retarded the political and industrial development of the emancipated colonies, for it was an evil inheritance weighing heavily on successive generations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.