the inquisitors. Devoid of personal ambition, Torquemada
imprinted his own austerity on the entire institution of the
Inquisition in Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was also
aimed against MORISCOS(converted Muslims who were
thought still to be secret practitioners of the Islamic faith).
They were brutally treated by Diego Lucero, the inquisitor
of Cordova, after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in
1492, but his brutality was so blatant that he was eventu-
ally removed from office and imprisoned (1507). The
Spanish Inquisition was also active in the 16th century
against alumbrados, spiritualists whose mystic tendencies
went beyond orthodox bounds. This illuminism was prac-
ticed especially in Franciscan circles, although it may have
had its origins in Jewish and Muslim mystical traditions in
Spain which had influenced radical Franciscans. As Spain
closed its borders to outside ideas in the course of the 16th
century—against Erasmian currents and Lutheran hetero-
doxy especially—the Spanish Inquisition acted as the safe-
guard of Spanish Catholic orthodoxy.
The most notorious feature of the Spanish Inquisition
was its autos de fe (Portuguese: autos-da-fé). These were
ceremonies in which the inquisitors publicly charged their
prisoners with and convicted them of various heresies; af-
terward, those convicted of unrepentant heresy or of hav-
ing relapsed into heresy were burned at the stake. Others,
convicted of lesser charges, were imprisoned, had their
property confiscated (which then went into royal coffers),
were turned over to the Spanish galleys, or suffered other
humiliations.
The Inquisition also reached New Spain. There were
many autos-da-fé in Mexico, but there charges were not di-
rected against conversos, moriscos, or alumbrados, but
against “sorcerers”. Thus, the Spanish Inquisition rarely
acted against theological heresy in the New World, but
more often against what was called demonic magic. The
Spanish Inquisition survived until the 19th century when
it was suppressed by Napoleon (1808) and, after his fall,
by royal decree in 1834.
Further reading: Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisi-
tion: An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld & Nicol-
son, 1965; repr. Phoenix, 2000); ∼, Inquisition and Society
in Spain: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985); Benjamin Netanyahu, The
Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New
York: Random House, 1995).
Spanish language The romance language deriving from
the dialect of Castile, which is spoken in the Iberian
peninsula (together with Catalan, Basque, and Galician-
Portuguese), in part of Morocco, and in the countries of
the former Spanish empire (chiefly those of Central and
South America, with the major exception of Brazil). Like
other romance languages, Spanish descends from spoken
or Vulgar Latin, the day-to-day speech of Roman colonists,
and has evolved by acquiring distinctive features different
from Latin: a heavy stress accent (with certain effects on
the stressed vowel and the unstressed syllable, as tierra
from terra (land), mesa from mensa (table), and ojo from
oculus (“eye”), for example); a simplification of genders
and inflectional endings (replaced by analytic structures,
like prepositional phrases); definite and indefinite articles;
differences in the method of forming verbal tenses; and
many semantic developments.
Spanish also reflects, in varying degrees, a number
of other influences, both pre- and post-Roman. Among
pre-Roman influences are the Phoenicians (and
Carthaginians), Greeks, Iberians, Basques, and Celts.
Later, Germanic, Arabic, and Amerindian languages also
affected the character of Spanish. Pre-Roman traces are
seen mainly in place names, for example Málaga (Phoeni-
cian malka, “trading factory”), Ibiza (from Carthaginian),
Ampurias (Greek emporion, “market”), and Ebro (Iberian
Iberus, whence the patronymic of these people, who may
have been a number of unrelated migrant tribes). A few
common nouns, like manteca (“butter”) and bruja
(“witch”), are also pre-Roman. Castilian has some similar-
ities to the agglutinative non-Indo-European language of
the Basques. An important phonological detail is the lack
of the Latin f-sound in Basque, comparable to the Castil-
ian loss of Latin f in some contexts, for example hablar,
“to speak” (Latin fabulare) and hacer, “to do, make” (Latin
facere). Celtic migrations around 900 and 600 BCEleft
their mark both in place names and in some common
nouns: Segovia (Celtic sego, “victory”) and cerveza
(“beer”). With the decline of Rome, Germanic tribes
(Suevi, Asding and Siling Vandals, and Alans) invaded the
peninsula (409), followed (415) by a contingent of ro-
manized Visigoths from Toulouse who were sent as pro-
tection against them. As a result about 2500 Spanish place
names are traceable to these Germanic settlers (for exam-
ple, Andalusia, via Arabic al-Andalus, from -andal-, “Van-
dal”) as are typical personal names—Fernando, Gusmán
(“good man”), Ramón, Bermudo, Manrique, Rodrigo, etc.
The Moorish invasion of 711 had a telling effect on vo-
cabulary, contributing about 4000 lexical items, with the
Arabic in a number of instances replacing the Latin term.
Many of these words, especially in science, became part
of a common European vocabulary (alcohol, algebra,
alquimia, nadir, elixir, etc.). At various more recent stages
Spanish vocabulary has been influenced by French, Ital-
ian, and classical Latin (through learned borrowings in the
Renaissance and later). The American empire provided a
number of Indian words for common products—tomate,
chocolate, coca, maíz, patata, hamaca, etc.
With the completion of the reconquest of Andalusia
by Ferdinand II in 1492, Castilian was assured the posi-
tion of dominant dialect, though previously it had been
just one of four major forms of Spanish, the other three
being Aragonese (in Aragon and Navarre), Leonese (in
León), and Mozarabic (the Spanish of those who chose to44448 8 SSppaanniisshh llaanngguuaaggee