Tomás de Torquemada

Tomás de Torquemada (* 1420 in Valladolid, † September 16, 1498 in Ávila) was a Spanish Dominican, confessor of Isabella of Castile and the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain.

Life

Tomás de Torquemada visited the Dominican convent of San Pablo in his birth city of Valladolid and later became prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz, Province of Segovia. He acquired great political influence as an adviser and confessor of Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II in 1478, he was inquisitor for Castile and in 1483 after urging the royal couple by Pope Sixtus IV ordered for the first Grand Inquisitor of the Kingdom of Aragon. His remit was later expanded to Castile and finally extended to the whole of Spain from 1484.

With the construction of its own inquisitorial administrative apparatus for Tomás de Torquemada, Spain laid the foundation for the Spanish Inquisition, which should be up to the 19th century. Target and victim of the inquisitorial persecutions were out heretics primarily Jews who converted to Christianity (so-called conversos ) and converted to Christianity Moors ( Moriscos ).

Tomás de Torquemada founded, inter alia, the monastery of Santo Tomás Ávila to where he died in 1498. 1836 Tomás ' grave in Ávila was broken, the invaders burned - in allusion to the fate of his victims - his bones.

Tomás was the nephew of Juan de Torquemada, the prominent representatives papalistischer positions on the Council of Basel.

Origin

How many Spaniards of his time seems to have Torquemada himself had Jewish ancestors. The contemporary historian Hernando del Pulgar invoked to prove this fact to a letter from Torquemada's uncle Juan de Torquemada. This leads from there that his ancestor Alvar Fernández de Torquemada had married a Jewish Conversa ( a convert ). Thomas Hope also wrote in his published biography of Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor that the grandmother had been a Conversa.

Indigenous population of America

When the inhabitants of the Americas were discovered, it emerged theological explanation difficulties that they tried to bridge in several ways. It came to about the doctrine that had existed before or alongside Adam other progenitors of mankind in other parts of the world; the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada was of the opinion that the people and animals of America had been carried by angels over the ocean, while many conquistadors and later the geographically interested Jesuit priest Lafiteau which missionary in Canada was simply denied that the Indians were created by God. Only atheists could say such a thing, said Lafiteau.