- Portuguese Inquisition
The Portuguese Inquisition was formally established in
Portugal in1536 at the request of theKing of Portugal ,João III . Manuel I had asked for the installation of theInquisition in1515 , but was only after his death that the pope acquiesced. It was a Portuguese analogue of the more famousSpanish Inquisition .History
However, many place the actual beginning of the Portuguese Inquisition during the year of
1497 , when manyJews were expelled from Portugal and others were forcibly converted toCatholicism . As inSpain , the major target of the Portuguese Inquisition was mainly theSephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain in1492 (seeAlhambra decree ); after1492 many of these Spanish Jews left Spain for Portugal but were eventually targeted there as well.As in Spain, the Inquisition was put under the authority of the King. It was headed by a
Grand Inquisitor , or General Inquisitor, named by thePope but selected by the king, always from within theroyal family . The Grand Inquisitor would later nominate other inquisitors. In Portugal, the first Grand Inquisitor wasCardinal Henry , who would later become King. There were Courts of the Inquisition inLisbon ,Porto ,Coimbra , andÉvora .It held its first auto da fé in Portugal in
1540 . Like the Spanish Inquisition, it concentrated its efforts on rooting out converts from other faiths (overwhelminglyJudaism ) who did not adhere to the strictures of Catholic orthodoxy; as in Spain, the Portuguese inquisitors mostly targeted theJew ish "New Christians ," "conversos "," or "marranos "."The Portuguese Inquisition expanded its scope of operations from Portugal to Portugal's colonial possessions, including
Brazil ,Cape Verde , andGoa , where it continued as a religious court, investigating and trying cases of breaches of the tenets of orthodoxRoman Catholic ism until1821 .The activity of the courts was extended to book
censure ,divination ,witchcraft andbigamy under João III. Book censure proved to have a strong influence in Portuguesecultural evolution , keeping the country uninformed and culturally backward. Originally oriented for a religious action, the Inquisition had an influence in almost every aspect of Portuguese society, political, cultural and social.The
Goa Inquisition , another inquisition rife withantisemitism andanti-Hinduism that mostly targeted Jews and Hindus, was established inGoa in1560 by Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques, who occupied the palace of theSabaio Adil Khan .According to Henry Charles Lea [Henry Charles Lea, "A History of the Inquisition of Spain", vol. 3, Book 8.] between 1540 and
1794 tribunals in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Évora resulted in the burning of 1,175 persons, the burning of another 633 in effigy, and the penancing of 29,590. But documentation of fifteen out of 689 [António José Saraiva, Herman Prins Salomon, I. S. D. Sassoon, "The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquistion and Its New Christians 1536-1765", 2001, p. 102] Autos-da-fé has disappeared, so these numbers may slightly understate the activity.The Portuguese inquisition was extinguished in
1821 by the "General Extraordinary and ConstituentCourt s of the Portuguese Nation" .The Portuguese Government will make available online until
2010 a great part of the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition [ [http://dn.sapo.pt/2007/07/12/artes/papeis_inquisicao_net_apoio_mecenas.html Archives of the Inquisition will be available online - in Portuguese] ] .ee also
*
Goa Inquisition
*Judeo-Portuguese
*Sephardic Jews
**New Christians
** "Converso "
** "Marrano "
**Crypto-Jew s
*Ladino
*Sebastião de Melo, Marquis of Pombal
*Lusophobia
*History of the Jews in the Netherlands
**Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands
*History of the Jews in Latin America
*History of the Jews in England
**History of the Marranos in England Notes
References
*
Alexandre Herculano , "História da Origem e Estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal" ( _en. History of the Origin and Establishement of the Inquisition in Portugal, translation of 1926).External links
* [http://ttonline.iantt.pt/dserve.exe?dsqServer=calm6&dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=overview.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo='PT-TT-TSO') Index of the court proceedings and other documents of the Portuguese Inquisition (in Portuguese)]
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