Tomás de Torquemada

I was like...

I knew who Torquemada was, funnily enough, because of Monty bloody Python.

You know, when nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition.

[laughs]

And I think that that's one of the things that I think is really quite interesting with like with what Nemesis is doing, because like, yeah, OK, again, we're having a kind of obviously this is another reflection on fascism, but more particularly, obviously, like Nazism, I suppose, more particularly because we've got because we're being so expressly like race based.

But I mean, having him be Torquemada, are you joking? Come on.

Again, as a medieval historian, granted, I would argue that Tomás de Torquemada is a man of the early modern period.

We could put that to the side.

And the Spanish Inquisition is an early modern phenomenon.

Witness my excellent friend, Field Marshal Count Hermann Karl Heinrich Socrates von der Nordgieri zu Pfefferkorn, whose appellations puzzled a recording clerk of one of our courts lately, and that not a little.

That a splendid specimen of the genus homo, species monk, flourished in the earlier moitie of the fifteenth century, under the appellation of Torquemada, is notorious; and this fact might seem to establish the era of the story.

But then his name was John, not Dominic, though he was a Dominican; and hence the mistake, if any, may perhaps have originated.

But then, again, the Spanish queen, to whom he was confessor, was called Isabella, and not Blanche.

Such ogling and eyeing, in short, and such sighing, and such complimenting, one must not say lying, of smart cavaliers with each other still vying, mixed up with the crying and groans of the dying, all hissing and spitting and broiling and frying, form a scene which, although there can be no denying, to a bon catholique it may prove edifying.

I doubt if a Protestant, smart beau or merry belle, might not shrink from it as somewhat too terrible.

It's a question with me if you ever surveyed a more stern-looking mortal than old Torquemada, renowned Father Dominic, famous for twisting domestic and foreign necks all over Christendom.

Marescos or Jews, not a penny to choose.

Immense masses of such documents were stored in the imperial archives of ancient Mexico.

Torquemada asserts that five cities alone yielded to the Spanish governor on one requisition no less than 16,000 volumes or scrolls.

Every leaf was destroyed.

Indeed, so thorough and wholesale was the destruction of these memorials, now so precious in our eyes, that hardly enough remained to whet the wits of antiquaries.

On the Red River, near the village of the Cados, was one of these, a small natural eminence to which all the Indian tribes for a great distance around pay devout homage, according to Dr. Sibley.

The Cerro Nastarni on the Rio Grande, the peak of Old Zuni in New Mexico, that of Colhuacan on the Pacific coast, Mount Apoala in Upper Mixteca, and Mount Neva in the province of Guaymi, are some of many elevations asserted by the neighboring nations to have been places of refuge for their ancestors when the fountains of the great deep broke forth.

One of the Mexican traditions related by Torquemada identified this with the mountain of Tlaloc in the terrestrial paradise, and added that one of the seven demigods who escaped commenced the pyramid of Cholula in its memory.

He intended that its summit should reach the clouds, but the gods, angry at his presumption, drove away the builders with lightning.

They bet their money because the inside dope said that the big fix was in.

And I can tell you what twenty thousand people are going to do to this inside dope when their nags run last is going to make Torquemada ask permission to return to life for a second inquisition, this time with extrasensory tortures.

He turned to me as Barcelona went pale.

"Wally," he said, "want to bet that somebody doesn't remember that old question of whether it's possible to break every bone in a man's body without killing him?" "I'd be a fool to cover that one," I said.

The fearful Inquisition was at last organized against heresy, and for many long years ran its hideous race of cruelty.

It asserted that one Inquisitor General, the infamous Torquemada, put nine thousand persons to death, and the entire number slaughtered by the Inquisition is commonly stated at thirty-two thousand.

But we remember the name of the arch of the bridge of history on which we stand, and fear to prolong our stay upon it beyond your patience.

I say again, men must have believed that Christ's well-known history was a history of facts, or they would not have risked their lives in the attempt to get possession of the land in which they believed he had lived, died, and risen again from the dead.