Oct 12, 2019, 7:46 PM
The purpose of the inquisition was:
… 1) to suppress factions (heresy) that would have weakened the church’s income (they were crooks), their political power, and the church’s ambition to take over as the central government of Europe
… 2) to standardize punishment given the wide variety of punishments coming out of various localities.
… 3) identify and prosecute muslims and jews that had pretended to convert but not,
… 4) and finally it evolved serve as a bludgeon to prosecute enemies during the reformation – and we see this in the witch trials which were the end process of that process combined with pre-christian heathen rituals.
We should note that the reason the french government was so bloodily overthrown was the same reason for the protestant reformation, which was the same reason for the Cathar / Albigensian crusade arose. The corruption because of the church’s attempt to imitate Byzantium, and Byzantium’s attempt to imitate the empires of the pre-muslim world: rule of ignorant illiterate people by superstition, instead of the western model of patriarchal, continuous domestication of man from slave, to freeman, to citizen, to senate.
The church was at a level of corruption similar to that of late french monarchy, and what we see in present Washington.
There is little difference today between Washington DC, Versailles, The church in France, and the church in Italy (where it did succeed in rule somewhat).
My read of the inquisition is a protestant propaganda campaign, and a more modern atheist campaign. In effect the church tried for many centuries to rule Europe as it did Byzantium and it failed. It failed and the many sovereign states succeeded. Because a monopoly calcifies and feeds corruption and a market competes and defeats corruption.