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Ok, opinions around the board on the Spanish Inquisition - do you see it is primarily religiously motivated or politically motivated?

During that time period, why not both?

Shroom Man 777 wrote:During that time period, why not both?

I am sure both but which is stronger if it can be determined

On the subject in general, I would point you towards Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's book on, and named after the village of, Montaillou.
It is an account largely compiled from the notes of the papal inquisition, and gives an excellent guide to their practises- the chief Inquisitor was the man who later became Pope Innocent VI.

Montaillou was one of the last Cathar strongholds, and it is astonishing just how many people there the inquisition managed to find innocent. Whether or not the 'crime' makes any sense at all is open to debate- personally I reckon the Cathar neo-Manichaean dualism and etherealism put them only one step away from outright nihilists, I have little sympathy with that line of thought- but a real effort seems to have been made both to punish the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

The inquisitors took some pride in their job, by Ladurie's account, and seem to have enjoyed the subtlety of their work, even if it was just castles in the air. Insofar as what they were doing made any sense at all, the papal inquisition were honest investigators within their own (I suspect most of the board would consider, insane) terms of reference.
They were primarily religiously motivated, but well aware of the ramifications- when religion influences politics and through that the fortune of the state and thereby the happiness or misery of the people, how easy is it to separate the religious and the civil?

The Spanish Inquisition and other national inquisitions were a different breed of animal, and one which I reckon deserves most of it's black reputation. Their job always involved a higher degree of wholesale bloodshed, and especially in the spanish empire in latin america as it grew up, a higher degree of serving the national interest.

The Spanish Inquisition had much more to do with non- Catholics and non-Christians entirely, and had the backing of the state, more or less; they never needed to be anything like the investigators the young Innocent VI and his colleagues were, because their targets were so much more easily brought down and they had little incentive, religious, financial or social, to identify and spare the innocent.

Religious to begin with, but from the early sixteenth century on increasingly- until the eighteenth, almost entirely- political and just plain financial. It was an excellent racket.

The more infamous inquisitions were typically a collaboration between civil and ecclesiatical authorities. I'm inclined to lay 50/50 responsibility for the consequences, since subtracting either party usually means no inquisition.

^Also, the papal inquisition did not have the backing of the most powerful authority available. The pope himself had less soldiers than the average duke and had to be really careful in what he was doing.

Marvin Harris makes a good case that much of the work of the various inquisitions, witch hunts etc was meant to demobilize the poor in case they started to get uppity. If they ran out of Cathars, there were Waldensians, or Jews, or witches, or crypto-Jews, or Anabaptists, or Gypsies to be hunted down and destroyed. A classic case of divide and rule.