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The Spanish Inquisition
“The Pit and the Pendulum” takes place during the waning days of the Spanish Inquisition, an institution used by the Spanish government to identify and punish those considered enemies to Spain. The concept of an inquisition as a means for the Catholic Church to legally seek out and punish heretics had been established in the twelfth century in France in retribution against minority Christian movements. In the fifteenth century, however, Spain established what is perhaps the most infamous iteration of the inquisition. The 1469 marriage of Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of Castille to Isabella of the Kingdom of Aragon united the two major kingdoms of Spain into one, and they worked to establish Spain’s identity as a Catholic kingdom. They petitioned Pope Sixtus IV for a papal bull—or an official letter—allowing the monarchs the right to name inquisitors for their kingdom, and their petition was granted in 1478.
The primary targets of the Inquisition were Jews, Muslims, heretics, and those suspected of witchcraft. At the time, Spain was in the process of expelling Muslims from Andalucía in the south, which had been ruled by the Muslim Umayyad and Almohad dynasties since the tenth century. This expulsion would later be called the Reconquista. In addition, Spain had the largest Jewish population in Europe, although beginning in the fourteenth century, widespread religious persecution had already forced many of them to leave or convert. These expulsions and forced conversions escalated under Ferdinand and Isabella. The Dominican friar Alonso de Ojeda additionally convinced Queen Isabella that many of the “conversos” who remained behind did not truly abandon their Jewish faith, which in her eyes was tantamount to heresy. The label of heretics was also applied to minority Christian groups, such as the Gnostics, whose beliefs deviated from those of the Catholic Church. Punishments for those convicted by the Inquisition were torturous and harsh. The most infamous was the auto-da-fé (Portuguese for “act of faith”), a public burning at the stake after a Catholic mass. The fifteenth-century Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada is credited with establishing the Spanish Inquisition’s reputation for inducing confessions by brutal torture, although no instance of an elaborate pendulum like the one Poe imagined has been documented.
Although the Inquisition’s fervor had nominally died down by the nineteenth century, it was not officially abolished for good until 1834, under the regency of Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies. In the eyes of the rest of Europe, the nineteenth-century Spanish Inquisition was pitted against the philosophical European Enlightenment. Beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European Enlightenment thinkers preached the power of reason, rational thought, humanism, and science, although not necessarily atheism. Instead, many Enlightenment thinkers espoused Deism, a form of Christianity that posited that God created the universe and then allowed it to run its course, watching but not interfering with humankind. The Inquisition set their sights primarily on books that espoused Enlightenment ideas, although there were still some executions of those teaching the principles of Deism as late as 1826. The Inquisition was temporarily abolished after Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Spain in 1809, which placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne.
Poe’s source for information on the Spanish Inquisition was an article entitled “Anecdote towards the History of the Spanish Inquisition,” originally published in London’s Literary Gazette in 1820 and then widely reprinted and circulated in the United States. Articles like this one saw some hope for the abolition of the Inquisition through the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Spain. Although Napoleon himself was not popular in Great Britain or the United States, these articles played on anti-Catholic sentiment to portray a barbaric and superstitious Spain, with pro-Enlightenment Napoleonic France self-styled as a liberator. Poe follows this narrative in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” bringing in the historical French general Antoine-Charles-Louis Lasalle, who was instrumental in the French conquest of Spain during the Peninsular War. Despite Poe’s story, Lasalle never set foot in Toledo. However, Poe’s sources portrayed Toledo as central to the Inquisition, which likely led to this misunderstanding.
