Torquemada, 1492, and a Long Afterlife

Tomas de Torquemada, appointed Grand Inquisitor in 1483, presided over the tribunal through the years leading up to 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree expelling Jews who would not convert, a measure historians connect to the Inquisition's own findings about the difficulty of policing converso loyalty while a professing Jewish community remained in the kingdom. Estimates of executions carried out on the Inquisition's sentences vary considerably among historians and are complicated by incomplete record survival; modern scholarship generally places confirmed executions across the institution's full history in the low thousands, a figure far below the exaggerated totals that circulated in polemical accounts from the sixteenth century onward, sometimes called the Black Legend.

The tribunal's attention broadened over the following centuries to Protestants, moriscos, and eventually to Enlightenment ideas and freemasonry, though its activity declined sharply after the seventeenth century. Napoleon's occupation of Spain suppressed it in 1808, it was briefly restored after his defeat, and it was formally abolished by royal decree in 1834, having operated in some form for three hundred and fifty six years.