Perhaps it will be another decade or two before we have witchcraft trials in Canada.  And who knows whether they will be conducted under the supervision of wise Islamic scholars?  For the concept of witchcraft is hardly unnatural to the mindset that has brought us "political correctness", and for all we know the trials will be conducted by human rights commissioners.  For centuries, through the "dark" and "middle" ages, the Catholic Church struggled to eradicate the pagan belief in witches from pre-Christian Europe, only to have witchcraft proceedings explode again, at the time of the Reformation.  We no longer appreciate what comes out on the table when free, rational thought is pushed under it.  (David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen, February 17,2008)

…But the most infamous event was when the captured men of Otranto were given the choice to convert to Islam or die; 800 of them held to their Christian faith and were beheaded en masseat a place now known as the Hill of the Martyrs.  The Turkish fleet then went on to attack the cities of Vieste, Lecce, Taranto and Brindisi and destroyed the great library at the Monastero di San Nicholas di Casole before returning to Ottoman territory in November.

It is one of the great ironies of history that three times more people died in the forgotten event that almost surely inspired the Spanish Inquisition than died in the famous flames of the inquisition itself.  Despite its reputation as one of the most vicious and lethal institutions in human history, the Spanish Inquisition was one of the most humane and decent of its time, and one could even argue the most reasonable, considering the circumstances.

The Spanish Inquisition did not attempt to convert anyone to Christianity.

The inquisitors were not slobbering psychotics as portrayed by Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe.

Torture was rarely used, and only when there was substantial evidence to indicate that the accused was lying.

The main reason there was a Spanish Inquisition in the first place is that, unlike in other European kingdoms, Ferdinand and Isabella encouraged Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity instead of simply expelling them all.

In light of its nightmarish reputation, it will surely surprise those who believe that millions of people died in the Spanish Inquisition to learn that throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, less than three people per year were sentenced to death by the Inquisition throughout the Spanish Empire, which ranged from Spain to Sicily and Peru.  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.  (Vox Day, "Atheists and Inquisition", World Net Daily, February 10, 2008)