Spanish Reconquista Torture

The Spanish Reconquista was the reconquest of Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims of North Africa by Christian kingdoms that lasted for more than seven and a half centuries. During this reconquest, the Inquisition started in 1478, with the original purpose of ensuring that those who converted to Christianity from Islam and Judaism, stayed converted. The Inquisition was a system that accuses, interrogate, and punish those who contradicted or didn’t follow the teachings of the Church. The arrival of the new royal decrees issued in 1492 made the regulation more intensified, that ordered non-Christians to convert or leave Spain. Some Jews and Muslims accepted Christianity in order to stay in Spain. Some Jews chose to leave Spain in the “three months’ time” given to them, in which they suffered greatly and even died on the journey because people acted “maliciously and meanly” towards them by robbing, oppressing and enslaving them (Marcus 2). This led many Jewish People to die because of “hunger, thirst, and lack of everything” (Marcus 2). As a result of the Inquisition, Many torture methods were introduced. Some of these gruesome torture methods were

Torture cannot be justified, even at the cost of forbidding the use of torture in rare cases that involve obtaining information in which it might be morally justified. This is because the information and the technique itself is inaccurate and unreliable. Martin Robbins makes a strong argument on how torture doesn’t work in the text “Does Torture Work?”. Robbins points out that when one is in extreme pain, they will say anything that the “interrogator wants to hear” and make up lies “to get the pain to stop” (Robbins 1). Thus, this technique yields unreliable results. Robbins further argues that human memory is often not reliable and science tell us that torturing makes that person’s memory even less