SPANISH INQUISITION • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Spanish Inquisition

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/spˈænɪʃ ˌɪnkwəzˈɪʃən/ Listen

Spanish Inquisition

noun

An inquisition initiated in 1478 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that guarded the orthodoxy of Catholicism in Spain (especially from the 15th to the 17th centuries). "Torquemada was the inquisitor general for the Spanish Inquisition"

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Etymology of 'Spanish Inquisition'

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"Spanish inquisition" Quotes from Famous Books

... be sold till Kirke had had the refusal of them. No question of right could be decided till Kirke had been bribed. Once, merely from a malignant whim, he staved all the wine in a vintner's cellar. On another occasion he drove all the Jews from Tangier. Two of them he sent to the Spanish Inquisition, which forthwith burned them. Under this iron domination scarce a complaint was heard; for hatred was effectually kept down by terror. Two persons who had been refractory were found murdered; and it ...

— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the most ingenious mind of anybody I know. He ought to have been in the Spanish Inquisition just to think up new torments. I don't wonder they like him so well on the Stock Exchange: he probably initiates new members and makes them ride goats. Anyway, nothing could change him about the automobile, and I closed the deal quick, lest he might ...

— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne

... excitement produced in all minds by the peril to which their faith was exposed, the subject felt not the pressure of those burdens and privations under which, in cooler moments, he would have sunk exhausted. The terrors of the Spanish Inquisition, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's, procured for the Prince of Orange, the Admiral Coligny, the British Queen Elizabeth, and the Protestant princes of Germany, supplies of men and money from their subjects, to a degree which ...

— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.

... effective test of impassioned controversy. Persecution was a problem that had never troubled him. It was not a topic with theoretical Germans; the necessary books were hardly available, and a man might read all the popular histories and theologies without getting much further than the Spanish Inquisition. Ranke, averse from what is unpleasant, gave no details. The gravity of the question had never been brought home to Doellinger in forty years of public teaching. When he approached it, as late as 1861, he touched ...

— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... traitor at one word of denunciation from an idler or an enemy, and, as in the most tyrannical days of the Spanish Inquisition one-half of the nation was set to spy upon the other, that wooden box, with its slit, is put there ready to receive denunciations from one hand ...

— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

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