Instructions of Seville for the Inquisitors (1484)

The preamble names Tomás de Torquemada as prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz at Segovia, confessor of the king and queen and inquisitor general in their name, and lists those who met with him at Seville: the inquisitors of Seville, Córdoba, Ciudad Real and Jaén, with other men of learning from the royal council. Among them is Juan de San Martín, one of the two friars commissioned in 1480. They had been called together, it says, by order of the king and queen and by Torquemada, and they submit what they have decided to the judgment of the Church and of the pope.

The text is cited here from a printing of 1667, almost two centuries later, made by order of the inquisitor general of that day. It reprints a collection compiled by order of an earlier inquisitor general, Alonso Manrique. Its title page calls Torquemada the first inquisitor general of the kingdoms and lordships of Spain. The wording of the articles is therefore that of the tribunal’s own official collection, not of a manuscript of 1484, which this wiki has not seen.

Only the preamble and the first eight articles are used. They tell the inquisitors what to do on arriving in a place and what is to happen to those who confess within the term of grace and after it. They are rules, and do not show how any tribunal applied them; for that see the chronicler in History of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella and the complaints in Letters of 1482 on the Inquisition in Castile and Aragon. See the Spanish Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews.