Note 352 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Of all the chapters in the history of the Inquisition, the most tragical is the record of its work in Spain, for there a whole nation’s faculty of freethought was by its ministry strangled for a whole era. There is a prevalent notion that in Spain fanaticism had mastered the national life from the period of the overthrow of Arianism under the later Visigothic kings; and that there the extirpation of heresy was the spontaneous and congenial work of the bulk of the nation, giving vent to the spirit of intolerance ingrained in it in the long war with the Moors. “Spain,” says Michelet, “has always felt herself more Catholic than Rome.”352 But this is a serious misconception. Wars associated with a religious cause are usually followed rather by indifference than by increased faith; and the long wars of the Moors and the Christians in Spain had some such sequel,353 as had the Crusades, and the later wars of religion in France and Germany. It is true that for a century after the (political) conversion of the Visigothic king Recared (587) from Arianism to Catholicism—an age of complete decadence—the policy of the Spanish Church was extremely intolerant, as might have been expected. The Jews, in particular, were repeatedly and murderously persecuted;354 but after the fall of the Visigoths before the invading Moors, the treatment of all forms of heresy in the Christian parts of the Peninsula, down to the establishment of the second or New Inquisition under Torquemada, was in general rather less severe than elsewhere.355