I just found out this startling fact[sic]. In all a REAL liberally estimated 20,000 people died in the Inquisitions.
Joshua Lee countered with:
I think the figure in Spain itself was 60,000, mostly tortured to death. 600,000 were interrogated but recieved lesser penalties. An additional 500,000 were exiled prior to this in 1492, many died from disease and hunger.
And jonny vee added:
Here's a little more:
"...Torture was officially sanctioned in 1257 and remained a legal recourse of the church for five and a half centuries until it was abolished by Pope Pius VII in 1816.
"The victims in those five and a half centuries were literally countless. Official burnings were only a beginning. There were also the disrupted, starving families; unrecorded suicides; unreported lynchings; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who died unnoticed in the papal crusades against heretical groups....
"The chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1586, the entire female population of two villages was wiped out by the inquisitors, except for only two women left alive.(1) Two other villages were destroyed completely and erased from the map.(2) One hundred and thirty-three persons were burned in a single day at Quedlinburg in 1589, out of a town of 12,000. Henri Boguet said Germany in 1590 was "almost entirely occupied with building fires (for witches) and Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their account. Travelers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound."(3)
"In 1524, one thousand witches died at Como.(4) Strasbourg burned five thousand in a period of 20 years.(5) The Senate of Savoy condemned 800 witches at one time. Parame stated that over thirty thousand were executed in the 15th century.(6) Nicholas Remy said he personally snetenced 800 witches in 15 years and in one year alone forced sixteen witches to suicide. A bishop of Mamberg claimed 600 witches in 10 years; a bishop of Nancy, 800 in 16 years; a bishop of Wurtzberg, 1900 in 5 years. Five hundred were executed within three months at Geneva and 400 in a single day at Toulouse. The city of Treves burned 7000 witches. The Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov, who claimed to have read the Bible 53 times, sentenced 20,000 devil-worshippers. Even relatively permissive England killed 30,000 witches between 1542 and 1736. The slaughter went on throughout Christian Europe for nearly five centuries."
from _The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets_ by Barbara G. Walker, New York: Harper & Row, 1983
Footnotes numbered (1) through (6) refer to these sources:
(1) Montague Summers, _The Geography of Witchcraft_ New York: University Books Inc., 1958 _ 486-487
(2) Rossell Hope Robbins, _Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology_, p 219 New York: Crown Publishers, 1959
(3) Wayne Shumaker, _The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance_, p 61 Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1972
(4) Sir Walter Scott, _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_, p 170 London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884
(5) Robbins, 219
(6) Coulton, G.G. _Inquisition and Liberty_, p 263 Boston: Beacon Press, 1959
This was all I could find for documented numbers without making a major search, but it is still more than twice what Mr. Poggioli claims.
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