Enforcing Religious Repression in an Age of World Empires: Assessing the Global Reach of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions

Abstract

This article highlights how the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions endeavoured to police religious orthodoxy on a global scale in an era without modern means of communication or personal identification. It examines how the inquisitors struggled to deal successfully with the high mobility of individuals who not only moved within the Spanish and Portuguese empires but also across political boundaries. The first section examines the means by which inquisitorial tribunals surmounted the challenge of geographical distance in their attempt to impose orthodoxy throughout the Iberian empires and ensure that individuals suspected of heresy could not seek to take advantage of the vastness of the Spanish and Portuguese empires to evade justice. The second section focuses on a single trial initiated in the Indian tribunal of Goa in the early seventeenth century and uses this case study to illustrate the manner in which the Inquisition was able to overcome the seemingly intractable obstacles of geographical and temporal distance, as well as jurisdictional boundaries, to establish the identity of a suspected heretic and prosecute him.