“Inquisition” began as a Roman-law inquiry, not a dungeon brand
Church courts once opened cases on their own initiative through a procedure called inquisitio—an inquiry revived from Roman law. Popular memory lumps that method with later heresy tribunals in Spain, Portugal, and Rome that monitored Conversos and Catholic dissenters during Reformation struggles.
Strictly, an inquisition was a procedure: church judges could open a case themselves, investigate it and try it, rather than waiting for an accuser. The method grew out of a legal revival. In the high Middle Ages many disputes were settled by ordeals of fire, water or combat, or by compurgation, where character witnesses vouched for the accused. As major Roman law texts resurfaced in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the new University of Bologna began training lawyers in Roman jurisprudence, and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required inquisitorial procedure for capital cases in church courts. Secular courts gradually followed, and many countries still use inquisitorial rather than adversarial systems.
The reform had a dark side. Circumstantial evidence could no longer convict in capital cases; two or more witnesses were needed, which made confessions far more valuable and encouraged the threat and use of torture. Late medieval jurists wrote detailed rules on when, how much, by whom and under what medical supervision it could be applied, though because it happened during investigation it was often left out of written records. Historian Henry A. Kelly calls the procedure a brilliant innovation by the greatest lawyer-pope of the age and treats later abuses as a corruption of it.
In popular usage the Inquisition means the tribunals, often state-run, that hunted heresy, apostasy, blasphemy and witchcraft. They began in twelfth-century France against the Cathars and Waldensians, and courts up to the mid-fifteenth century are grouped as the Medieval Inquisition. The Spanish and Portuguese versions targeted Conversos and Marranos, Jews pushed into Christianity, and Moriscos, converted Muslims, suspecting secret reversion or rebellion, and ran branches in Goa, Peru and Mexico.
The Reformation widened their reach, and in 1542 Rome set up a supreme congregation meant to steer inquisitorial work everywhere. Outside the Papal States, church inquisition courts were abolished in the early nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars and Latin American independence. The papal body survived under a series of names and today sits inside the Vatican's doctrinal dicastery.
Source: Inquisition
