Beyond The Myth Of The Inquisition II: Courts, Justice, and the Reality behind The Black Legend

But setting up a tribunal was nothing new, and the majority of dioceses had courts authorized by the bishops to judge a variety of cases and subjects according to canon law. Heresy was only one field of their inquiry; an “inquisition” was just a more particularized juridical entity akin to what we might call the office of “special prosecutor” today. For the most part no other judicial system existed other than the ecclesiastical, and it took centuries for the European secular state to emerge with its own totally separate system of law enforcement and justice. As a matter of fact, many inquisitors were laymen trained in law, and denunciations were routinely made by ordinary citizens, not special spies. The gothic image of the “mad monks” whose espionage network extended everywhere goes against the abundant authentic documentation we have available. The Inquisition was never as efficient as it would have liked to be, and as the decades wore on it became a sclerotic bureaucracy like any bureaucracy. It had always depended upon being itinerant, and when this ceased or was slowed down, even greater inefficiency ensued. As to the severity of the Inquisition, the following is informative for the contemporary reader: The proportionately small number of executions is an effective argument against the legend of a bloodthirsty tribunal. Nothing, certainly, can efface the horror of the first twenty holocaust years. Nor can occasional outbursts of savagery, such as overtook the Chuetas in the late seventeenth century, be minimized. But it is clear that for most of its existence the Inquisition was far from being a juggernaut of death either in intention or in capability. The figures given above for punishments in Valencia and Galicia suggest an execution rate of well under 2 per cent of the accused. It has been estimated that in the nineteen tribunals analysed above, the execution rate over the period 1540-1700 was 1.83 per cent for relaxations in person and 1.65 per cent for relaxations in effigy. If this is anywhere near the truth, it would seem that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less than three people a year were executed by the Inquisition in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily to Peru — possibly a lower rate than in any provincial court of justice. A comparison, indeed, of secular courts and the Inquisition can only be in favor of the latter as far as rigour is concerned. In 1573, for instance, the corregidor of Plascencia handed over to the Holy Office in Llerena a Morisco condemned by his jurisdiction to be hanged and quartered for allegedly smashing an image of the Virgin, but the Inquisition found the case unproven and set him free. It must be remembered, of course, that although the death rate was low it was also heavily weighted against people of Jewish and Moorish origin. The relative frequency of burnings in the earlier years disappeared in the eighteenth century, and in the twenty-nine years of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only four people were burned.

This article is part of The Spanish Inquisition - Full Series Guide

For the complete overview , reading order, and historical context, see the full guide.

Beyond The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition - Part I

Long did old-fashioned English Protestants and other anti-Catholics put their attention upon words such as “jesuitical,” “popish,” “jansenistic,” and “inquisitorial” in their polemics. But possibly the most odious, and the most successfully repromoted, is the idea of the hated Inquisition as the cruel tool of the Catholic Church to crush its enemies. By this means, especially for English-speakers, Catholic Spain was portrayed as the arch-enemy of all Protestantism. In the United States, whether it be the vulgarized Chick comics, or the sophisticated Ivy League intellectuals in 1960 who feared the Kennedy campaign, the Inquisition is generally assumed to be the Roman part of the triad denounced by clergyman Samuel Dickinson Burchard in 1884 in the famed expression “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” American Know-Nothings and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs constantly reprinted, or even the purveyors of the post-1968 sexual revolution or abortion-on-demand today, bring up the ghost of the Inquisition to suit their diverse purposes. But what do they know of its history? Are they aware the Inquisition was never primarily an anti-Protestant body, and that Philip II of Spain never had a consistently anti-Protestant foreign policy? Is it clear that most countries had their own equivalent structure for judging heresy, with no need to import anything similar from Spain, whether the would-be importer were Catholic or Protestant? How many remember that anti-Spanish feeling ran high in Italy where the Spanish Inquisition was ridiculed — and where Italian Catholics scorned the idea of racial purity? “It is one of the features of inquisitorial history that its practitioners have consistently failed to compare the Spanish Inquisition to comparable courts elsewhere in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe.”Distinctions are still often not made between the Roman (and purely ecclesiastical) Inquisition, and the Spanish secular-ecclesiastical “dual” Inquisition whose famous administrator was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada. His career as Grand Inquisitor (sole control was never his — he shared it with other “heads”) ended with his death in 1498, well before the advent of Luther and Calvin. Most often with no elucidating context, the Inquisition is assumed to be a weapon of the Catholic Church against all heretics, in whatever age, even though its somewhat mild ecclesiastical form was originally set up after 1232 to deal with the Cathars or Albigensians in late medieval France. Or, it is seen as the sole reason for the downfall of Spain itself in later centuries.

This article is part of The Spanish Inquisition - Full Series Guide

For the complete overview , reading order, and historical context, see the full guide.

Tornadoes - Nature's Most Violent Storms ( I )

Although tornadoes occur in many parts of the world, these destructive forces of nature are found most frequently in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains during the spring and summer months. In an average year, 800 tornadoes are reported nationwide, resulting in 80 deaths and over 1,500 injuries.

A tornado is a violently rotating column of air which descends from a thunderstorm to the ground. No other weather phenomenon can match the fury and destructive power of tornadoes. Tornadoes can be strong enough to destroy large buildings, leaving only the bare concrete foundation. In addition, they can lift 20-ton railroad cars from their tracks and they can drive straw and blades of grass into tree and telephone poles.

How do tornadoes form?

The truth is that scientists don't fully understand how tornadoes form. Typically, tornadoes develop several thousand feet above the earth's surface inside of a severe rotating thunderstorm. Thunderstorms develop in warm, moist air in advance of eastward-moving cold fronts. These thunderstorms often produce large hail, strong winds, and tornadoes. Tornadoes in the winter and early spring are often associated with strong, frontal systems that form in the Central States and move east. Occasionally, large outbreaks of tornadoes occur with this type of weather pattern. Several states may be affected by numerous severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

During the spring in the Central Plains, thunderstorms frequently develop along a "dryline," which separates very warm, moist air to the east from hot, dry air to the west. Tornado-producing thunderstorms may form as the dryline moves east during the afternoon hours.

Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, in the Texas panhandle, and in the southern High Plains, thunderstorms frequently form as air near the ground flows "upslope" toward higher terrain. If other favorable conditions exist, these thunderstorms can produce tornadoes.

Tornadoes occasionally accompany tropical storms and hurricanes that move over land. Tornadoes are most common to the right and ahead of the path of the storm center as it comes onshore.

Elizabeth Bathory - The Blood Countess

Elizabeth (or 'Erzsebet') Bathory was born the daughter of George and Anna Bathory in 1560. Bathory spent most of her adult life at Castle Cachtice. Though the castle was mistakenly reported as being in Transylvania by Raymond T. McNally, it is actually located near the town of Vishine, just north-east of what is present day Bratislava (where Austria, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic come together).

Bathory grew up in an era when much of Hungary had been overrun by the Turkish forces of the Ottoman empire and was a battleground between Turkish and Austiran (Hapsburg) armies. The area was also split by religous differences. Her family sided with the new wave of Protestantism that opposed the traditional Romanian Catholisism. She was raised on the Bathory family estate at Ecsed in Transylvania. As a child Bathory was subject to seizures accompanied by intense rage and uncontrollable behavior.


Elizabeth became pregnant as the result of a brief affair with a peasant man in 1574. When her condition became evident, she was sequestereduntil the baby's birth, due to her engagement to Count Ferenc Nadasdy. They were married in May of 1575. Since Nadasdy was a soldier, he was frequently away for long periods of time. This left Bathory with the duties of managing the affairs of the Nadasdy family estate, Castle Sarvar. It was here that Elizabeth's career of evil truly began, with the disciplining of the large household staff, especially the young girls. 


In a time period in which cruel and arbitrary behavior by those in power toward those who were servants was common, Elizabeth's level of cruelty was noteworthy. She did not just punish infringements on her rules, but found excuses to inflict punishments and delighted in the torture and death of her victim's far beyond what her contemporaries could accept. She would stick pins in various sensitive body part, such as under the fingernails. In the winter she would execute victims by having them stripped, led out into the snow, and doused with water until they were frozen.


Bathory's husband joined in some of her sadistic behavior and actually taught his wife a some new varieties of punishment. For example, he showed her a summertime version of her freezing exercise - he had a woman stripped, covered with honey, then left outside to be bitten by numerous insects. He died in 1604, and Elizabeth moved to Vienna soon after his burial.

Amongst her numerous acts and tortures, the accusation that Bathory drained the blood of her victims and bathed in it was what earned her the title of a vampire. It is also noted that she occasionally bit the flesh of the girls during their torture. It is said that the reason Bathory bathed in blood was to retain her youthful looks and beauty, and she was, by all accounts, a most attractive woman.


All records of Elizabeth were sealed for more than a century, and her name was forbidden to be spoken in Hungarian society.


Unlike most females of the time, Elizabeth was well educated and her intelligence surpassed even some of the men of her time. Elizabeth was exceptional, becoming "fluent in Hungarian, Latin, and German... when most Hungarian nobles could not even spell or write... Even the ruling prince of Transylvania at the time was barely literate." Some modern scholars and contemporaries of hers postulated that she may have been insane, thus accounting for her seemingly inconceivable atrocities, but even a brief glance into her past reveals a person fully in control of her faculties.


In the summer of 1610 an official inquiry began concerning Elizabeth's actions. However, it was not vast number of her victim's that brought Bathory to court, but rather, political concerns instead. The crown hoped to escape from paying back a rather extensive loan that her husband had made to the king, as well as wishing to confiscate her land holdings, which were rather large as well.


On December 19, 1610, Bathory was arrested, and a few days later, placed on trial. The trial, mainly for show, was conducted by an agent of the king, Count Thurzo, it was initated not only for a conviction, but for the confiscation of her lands as well. One week following the first trial, on January 7, 1611, a second trail was convened.


During the second trail a register that had been retrieved from Elizabeth's living quarters was submitted as evidence. The register recorded the naes of 650 victims, all written in Bathory's handwriting. Bathory's accomplices were sentenced to be executed. The manner of their deaths was determined by thier roles in the tortures. Elizabeth herself was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement.

Bathroy was held in a room of her Cachtice castle. The room contained no windows of doors, only a few slits for air, and a small opening for food and water to be given to her. Elizabeth remained in confinement there until her death three years later on August 21, 1614. She was buried in the Bathory lands at Ecsed.


Dracula, created by the Irish author Bram Stoker, was based, albeit loosely, on the Romanian Prince, Vlad Dracula, the Impaler. Raymond T. McNally, who has written four books on the figure of Dracula in history, literature, and vampirism, in his fifth book, Dracula was a Woman, presents insights into the fact that Stoker's Count Dracula was also strongly influenced by the legends of Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary. Why, for example, make a Romanian Prince into a Hungarian Count? Why, if there are no accounts of Vlad Dracula drinking human blood, does blood drinking consume the Dracula of Stoker's novel, who, contrary to established vampire myth, seems to appear younger after doing so? The answers, of course, lie in examining the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory.


It was largely Slovak servants whom Elizabeth killed, so the name "Csejthe" is only spoken in derision, and she is still called "The Hungarian Whore" in the area. 

The Corset - A Symbol Of Powerful Female Expression ( II )

Corsets basically evolved into the modern bra. But there clearly remains a fashionable allure for the earlier predecessor. Described today as gorgeous, ultra-glamorous, and sexy, corsets are available in a variety of styles and colors, fabricated from all types of materials. They're often boned as were early patterns. But now, three things make modern corsets distinctly different from 16th and 17th century patterns. Today they range in size from small to 3X and above. Corsets are worn as outerwear, with jeans in casual settings and glamorized for evening wear. They are often used as lingerie, and unlike their predecessors, they're designed to be comfortable and easy to get in and out of quickly. In recent corset news, confirming the fascination with these garments, celebrities have custom designed embellished leather corsets and those made from other unusual and creative materials that have been auctioned for upwards of $1000 and beyond, to benefit charity. Not only are corsets sexy fashion, but they have become a very profitable endeavor! On the lingerie front, leather corsets or those made from classic lace or racier PVC are popular today and available in a variety of styles and sizes as well. Just like their outerwear counterparts, a myriad of designs are created to accentuate the curves of the female physique and they are consciously designed to flatter the wearer. Many lingerie corsets now have optional G-strings and detachable garters. Other options include front zippers, lace up backs, hook and eye front closure, and adjustable shoulder straps. Sometimes lycra is added for more comfort and many patterns are lined in silk or satin. It's unlikely that the "powerful women of eras past" would have considered one of these garments as a staple in their wardrobe. But as for the women of today, current day corsets, from the simplest to the most elaborate, are one way of exuding powerful feminine expression on the outside and underneath.