Aunque si es cierto que los jodidos herejes

tienden a reconocer ahora que la cosa no fue para tanto (al menos desde el punto de vista del número de ejecutados, otra cosa es el clima de temor y el control ideológico, of course.
De "La Inquisición: el Reino del Terror" de Toby Green.
Citar:
There is no doubt that these figures are lower
than many have long believed.44 Removing the
first fifty years of inquisitorial history in Portugal
and Spain from the equation, the number of
deaths is much lower than the number of people
killed during the witch-hunts of northern Europe
between 1560 and 1680, which is put at a minimum
of 40,000.45 And whereas bloody witch-hunts
engulfed Austria, England, France, Germany,
Holland, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and
Transylvania, the Inquisition in Portugal and
Spain, while prosecuting ‘witches’, executed
very few of them. These comparisons have led
historians – both past and present – to claim that
Spain has been the victim of a ‘black legend’
which paints the violence of its Inquisition and of
Spain’s conquest of America in the worst light
possible whilst skating over similar or worse excesses
elsewhere.
The ‘black legend’ originated in the mid-16th
century after the pope freed Alfonso Díaz, a lawyer
at the papal court; Díaz had instigated the
murder of his own brother Juan because he had
become a Protestant whilst studying in Paris.46
The case became something of a cause célèbre
and led to numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets
across northern Europe. These were augmented
by the publication in the 1560s of a book by an
anonymous Spanish fugitive from the Inquisition
written under the pseudonym Reinaldo González
Montes. Montes had probably been a monk accused
of Protestantism in Seville in the 1560s,
and he published a graphic and unsympathetic
account of the Inquisition after his escape to
northern Europe.47 Such publications were seized
on by countries jealous and fearful of Spain’s
power; they quickly became tools in a propaganda
campaign which, there can be no doubt,
unfairly demonized the activities of the Inquisition
in comparison to other persecutions then occurring
both in Europe and elsewhere.48
Yet there is a difference between putting the
Inquisition in context and excusing its excesses.
The Inquisition did not overly persecute witches,
but this was principally because, as we shall see,
the unique cultural mixture of Portugal and Spain
provided other scapegoats to persecute without
the need to invent witches.49 Even more seriously,
in the desire to put right the black legend,
worrying errors of fact are still being made by
some, such as the claim that torture was ‘only
rarely applied – almost exclusively during the
first two decades’ (see Chapter Three).50
In Spain, many of these revisionist historians
were originally trained under the Franco regime,
to which the Catholic Church was a formidable
ideological prop. The intellectual atmosphere of
this era is well expressed by the view of Antonio
Sierra Corella, author of a book on censorship
under the Inquisition, who declared in 1947,
‘Only some wretched author, infected by an anachronistic
sense of liberalism, could argue with
any conviction against the legal censorship of
science and literature, as if this vital social function
were an unjust and annoying interference of
power.’51
The Francoist era was one when people often
wrote obliquely about present events by concentrating
on an aspect of the past.52 The growth in
revisionist views of the Inquisition under Franco
in fact mirrored the attempt to sanitize views of
the general’s regime and of its impact on Spain.53
The legacy of these views today should not,
therefore, be treated with the respect which in
some circles it is still afforded – unless we want
to find that the black legend is replaced by a
white one, and that the dangers of creating a persecuting
state apparatus are not fully appreciated.