AHC: A Christian Inquisition in Anatolia similar to the Spanish Inquisition

One weakness of this argument, and indeed of the whole book, is that Kamen, anxious to counter the 19th-century conception of the Inquisition as a monster that ultimately consumed Spain, fails to get inside the belly of the beast and to assess what it actually meant to individuals living with it. Little is said, for example, about the Inquisitors themselves, and what they sought to achieve beyond a confession of a guilt. Recent studies suggest that they were not faceless bureaucrats but law graduates with varying interests and career aims. Some were even capable of fraternizing with the people they investigated. Nor does Kamen lead the reader through an actual trial. Had he done so, a reader might conclude that the institution he portrays as relatively benign in hindsight was also capable of inspiring fear and desperate attempts at escape, and thus more deserving of its earlier reputation. More too might have been said about the lawyers who intervened in the trials and manipulated its procedures, along with the ploys, like bribes and pleas of insanity, that defendants used to bring the inquisitorial machinery to a halt."

Arguments like this make me trust the book more. The job of a historian is to assess the accuracy of claims, to discover the facts of what really happened. Obtaining reliable, scientifical knowledge about the past. Not to play psychologist and get in the mind of the people back then (which is best left to the historical novels, or alternate historians :D).

If we are studying the Inquisition and its effects, we need to know about numbers, about percentage of convictions, about the accuracy of those convictions in respect to the legislation of the moment. Not about the motivations of the lawyers or the fear of those being tried, because, in the end, without written proof, those are bound to be anacronic.
 
I don't see way Byzanthium is portrayed by many posters as much more tolerant than Spain, to the point which an Inquisition would be an idea completely alien to them.

How did they treated the Jews in the VI or VII century, for example? Wasn't there discrimination and force conversions? How many monks were prosecuted during the Iconoclast period? More importantly, what happen to muslims in Crete when Byzanthium retook the island around 900 IIRC? Who's to say the same cannot happen if the retake Anatolia in the XIII century?
 
Arguments like this make me trust the book more. The job of a historian is to assess the accuracy of claims, to discover the facts of what really happened. Obtaining reliable, scientifical knowledge about the past. Not to play psychologist and get in the mind of the people back then (which is best left to the historical novels, or alternate historians :D).

If we are studying the Inquisition and its effects, we need to know about numbers, about percentage of convictions, about the accuracy of those convictions in respect to the legislation of the moment. Not about the motivations of the lawyers or the fear of those being tried, because, in the end, without written proof, those are bound to be anacronic.

We're not talking about playing psychologist here, we're talking about actually covering the subject - individual inquisitors having different motivations and feelings is a hugely important thing to cover in the light of trying to prove something on the Inquisition, or how it created "fear and desperate attempts to escape" if it wasn't at all worrisome to be in its clutches.

If the historian wants to opt out of covering that, the historian is failing at covering the subject he professes to be talking about.

Admiral Brown: I don't know about any other poster, but I'm not using the words "tolerant" except in the context of being more pragmatic - Byzantium could be fiercely intolerant within the issue of what was orthodox Christianity (thus the comparison to internet flame wars), but it has no reason to persecute those who appear to be following the party line but might secretly not be doing so. Different environment, different attitudes - being pure blooded is irrelevant so finding out someone's great grandfather was a Turk would mean virtually nothing, for example, whereas as the Spanish idea of "pure blood" is the opposite tack.
 
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We're not talking about playing psychologist here, we're talking about actually covering the subject - individual inquisitors having different motivations and feelings is a hugely important thing to cover in the light of trying to prove something on the Inquisition, or how it created "fear and desperate attempts to escape" if it wasn't at all worrisome to be in its clutches.

If the historian wants to opt out of covering that, the historian is failing at covering the subject he professes to be talking about.
That would involve showing whether the "fear and desperate attempts to escape" were produced or not also by any other legal system of the moment. We're talking about the XVI century here.
So proving what you suggest involves a much wider study, maybe of a scope impossible to cover in any reasonably-timed research.

We have to stick to what we can know. The data.

What is the use of knowing the motivation of individual inquisitors? I'm sure the amount is not a statistic sample, but having in account that it consisted in 12 permanent tribunals + 1 (the supreme council) and it lasted over 300 years, it must have had enough inquisitors to erode the influence of individual characters. Unless you mean the personalities of the Great Inquisitors.
 
That would involve showing whether the "fear and desperate attempts to escape" were produced or not also by any other legal system of the moment. We're talking about the XVI century here.

No more than studying how often torture was used would require a comparison to any other legal system of the moment.

So proving what you suggest involves a much wider study, maybe of a scope impossible to cover in any reasonably-timed research.

We have to stick to what we can know. The data.
Oh, I'm sorry. I made the mistake of assuming we were capable of actually studying history.

You cannot create an accurate account of the Inquisition and ignore that element. Anything that does is, at best, incomplete, and at worst grossly misleading.

(To) "assess what it actually meant to individuals living with it." is exactly what we need from an accurate account on the subject - not a bunch of figures that tell us nothing.

What is the use of knowing the motivation of individual inquisitors? I'm sure the amount is not a statistic sample, but having in account that it consisted in 12 permanent tribunals + 1 (the supreme council) and it lasted over 300 years, it must have had enough inquisitors to erode the influence of individual characters. Unless you mean the personalities of the Great Inquisitors.
What is the use of studying individual generals? Individual kings? Individual anyone?
 

katchen

Banned
When it's Byzantium we're talking about, all three of you are right. Byzantium actually had a history and a track record of being far LESS tolerant than Spain. There was a great deal of give and take in Spanish society in the lead up to the Spanish Inquisition, with ideas penetrating from Judaism and Islam into Christianity and a great deal of mystical speculation of all kinds. This was why Aragon and Leon were centers of Jewish Kabbalah. The only problem was that all that religious ferment proved destabilizing...

Byzantium by contrast had a long history of the state enforcing religious orthodoxy all the way back to the time of Theodosius. The history includes the martyrdom of Hypatia and the first burning of the Library of Alexandria, the closing of the Mystery Schools, multiple persecutions of the Jews to the point where Jews were driven out of Palestine in the 400s to settle in Spain and North Africa and Babylonia--and again in the 900s to the point where the Jewish Khazars would no longer trade with the Byzantine Empire. And the persecution of the Monophysite Copts of Egypt to the point that they welcomed forst the Zoroastrian Sassanids and when the Byzantines returned, after 10 more years, the more tolerant Arab conquerors.
So yes, based on the Eastern Roman Empire's previous track record, we can expect it to be quite heavy handed in it's enforcement of Orthodox Christiianity when it retakes Seljuk Anatolia---the more so than in a place like Spain since in the Eastern Roman Empire, the Orthodox Church is so much more closely tied to the State than in the West where the Vatican is independent of any particular ruler.
If we want to get a closer approximation of what such a church-state police force can look like, rather than a Western inquisiton, look at Tsar Ivan Grozny (the Terrible)'s secret police force that he set up out of the Russian Orthodox Church. The models the early Russian Tsars operated from were Byzantine models of governance inasmuch as they claimed the Byzantine title of Tsar and the claim to be the Third Rome by lineage, Grand Duke of Muscovy Ivan III having married a Byzantine Princess or so he claimed.
 
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