One thing people don't realice is, the spanish inquisition was the least bloody of the inquisitions, it got its bad fame from persecuting british merchans, which lets remember were anglican protestants and therefore indeed in violation of the law, but if anything even that should tell you how chill they were. Because the reason they got the bad name was how much said merchants SEETHED about it when they left spain... Meaning they were still ALIVE when they left spain, which is something the anglican witch hunters did not do to the catholics they persecuted until far, far later.
More importantly, something people miss is, Spain had just expelled the moors and jews, and many had converted to avoid exile (yes btw, exile (in the case of the moors) or genocyde (in the case of the southern jews... yeah we did that before it was cool :p), and as a result, now there was a pretty big issue with crypto-moorish and crypto-jewish terrorism, and this of course bred a loooot of paranoia on the christians. And you know what medieval peasants did when they got paranoid? Ask french mapmakers. Wanna know what the most common cause of death for french cartographers was? Getting killed by peasants who confused them for witches due to how weird their instruments seemed... Said instruments being the same shit our kids use in geometry class nowadays btw. Yeah, blood was gonna flow, a lot of it.
And that's why the spanish inquisition was founded. It wasn't to persecute the cryptos or kill people, it was to save the honest converts from getting murdered by angry peasants. And indeed not only was the spanish inquisition notoriously bloodless compared with the similar institutions of their time, (with only a 2% rate of death penalties even amongst those found guilty. Most common sentence being forced conversion and monetary damages, followed by prison and forced prayer.) but they were the first lawkeeping body to ban torture as a method, doing so even before the secular authorities. So yeah, torquemada quite literally did nothing wrong, he was not creating the inquisition to persecute people, he did it to mitigate the damages of the persecution that was already happening.
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