The enemy in the Inquisition

Abstract

The Inquisition has had, since traditional historiography, a certain reputation of being arbitrary and cruel in its condemnations. In this sense, since the study of its origin, the thesis has been postulated that the functions of the Holy Office were born in a context of "penal emergency", as Cavallero's prologue in his Inquisitorial Justice, for example, points out. This is how it can be understood in the way, given the nature shown of this court, that it is the precursor of a modern phenomenon: the criminal law of the enemy, due to the priority to remove the external threat (the enemy), because of its null guarantee that it complies with any norm. However, are all these parallels true or are such analyses overreaching? This article seeks to answer what can be considered as antecedents or not of the criminal law of the enemy in the Holy Office.