Inquisition - Movements

Movements

Most of Medieval Western and Central Europe had a long-standing veneer of Catholic standardisation over traditional non-Christian practices, with intermittent localized occurrences of different ideas (such as Catharism or Platonism) and constantly recurring anti-Semitic or anti-Judaic activity and conspiration.

Exceptionally, Portugal and Spain in the late Middle Ages consisted largely of multicultural territories of Muslim and Jewish influence, conquered from the Islamic states of Al-Andalus control, and the new Christian authorities could not assume that all their subjects would suddenly become and remain orthodox Catholics. So the Inquisition in Iberia, in the lands of the Reconquista counties and kingdoms like Leon, Castile and Aragon, had a special socio-political basis as well as more fundamentalistic religious motives. Later followed Portugal in this fundamentalistic christianisation.

With the Protestant Reformation, Catholic authorities became much more ready to suspect heresy in any new ideas, including those of Renaissance humanism, previously strongly supported by many at the top of the Church hierarchy. The extirpation of heretics became a much broader and more complex enterprise, complicated by the politics of territorial Protestant powers, especially in northern Europe. The Catholic Church could no longer exercise direct influence in the politics and justice-systems of lands which officially adopted Protestantism. Thus war (the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War), massacre (the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre) and the missional and propaganda work (by the Sacra congregatio de propaganda fide) of the Counter-Reformation came to play larger roles in these circumstances, and the roman law type of a "judicial" approach to heresy represented by the Inquisition became less important overall.

Historians distinguish four different manifestations of the Christian Inquisition:

1. the Medieval Inquisition (1184–16th century), including
   1. the Episcopal Inquisition (1184–1230s)
   2. the Papal Inquisition (1230s) and following Christian inquisitions
2. the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834)
3. the Portuguese Inquisition (1536–1821)
4. the Roman Inquisition (1542 – c. 1860)