Thousands of heretics and witches
possibly hundreds of thousands...
maybe millions...
(well ok, maybe not millions)
were burned at the stake by the bad old Catholic Church.
Secular historians given access to the Vatican's archives in 1998
discovered that of the 44,674 individuals tried between 1540 and 1700,
only 804 were recorded as being relictus culiae saeculari. The 763-page
report indicates that only 1 percent of the 125,000 trials recorded
over the entire inquisition ultimately resulted in execution by the secular
authority, which means that throughout its infamous 345-year history,
the dread Spanish Inquisition was less than one-fourteenth as deadly on
an annual basis as children's bicycles.
If the Spanish Inquisition was, as historian Henry Charles Lea once
described it, theocratic absolutism at its worst, one can only conclude
that this is an astonishingly positive testimony on behalf of
theocratic absolutism. It is testimony to the strange vagaries of history that it
should be the Spanish Inquisition that remains notorious today, even though the 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy murdered in the Spanish Republican Red Terror of 1936 is more than twice the number of the victims of 345 years of inquisition."
but everybody knows...
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