Spanish Inquisition « The Gospel According to the Romans

When Christians started out they had to find a place to hide,
For Romans were not pleasant to the Christians found outside;
They taxed the Christian buildings, and their jokes were rather snide
About the rude productions when the Passion Plays were plied.
But Christians turned the other cheek and counted up to ten —
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

The Romans built in marble and they carved in alabaster,
The Christians built in wood and lath, and covered it in plaster.
The Romans mocked inversion of the humble with the master,
And laughed at how the Christians stole their Christ from Zoroaster.
But through it all the Christians acted virtuously then —
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

But once the Christians got on top they went on the attack,
So long abused they thought they’d do their own abusing back.
Mean-spirited and mean, it’s Christian charity they lack,
And ever since they’ve warped their woof by talking trash and smack,
They’ve sought out cheats and pedophiles to be their clergymen.
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

L’envoi
The worse the Christians have it, why, the better they behave:
They’re rotten as the boss, but they are brilliant as the slave.
They ought to be reminded of their teachings now and then;
Perhaps we ought to persecute the Christians once again.

*****

Marcus Bales is one of the leading formalist poets writing today – he is a master of poetic form, from parodies of Kipling and Poe to the creation of his purely original work as in ‘Perhaps’. His collection “51 Poems” is available from Amazon.

Credit: The inside of a jail of the Spanish Inquisition, with a priest supervising his scribe while men and women are suspended from pulleys, tortured on the rack or burnt with torches. Etching.
Wellcome Collection.

From Europe to India, a major geopolitical event in 1492 had everyone talking – and it had nothing to do with Columbus. Columbus was just some explorer who had discovered some islands somewhere. But the really big news was that, after nearly 800 years, the aggressive Christians had finally kicked the more cultured Muslims out of Spain.

The Great Mosque of Cordoba

Granada was conquered. Cordoba and Seville, the greatest centers of learning in Europe, where thousands of Christian scholars had traveled surreptitiously, and from which the European Renaissance had been born, were now turned into fresh hunting grounds for the Spanish Inquisition. Decrees ordered Muslims and Jews to convert or leave. Tens of thousands chose the former, hundreds of thousands the latter. Of those who converted and stayed, thousands were subsequently executed by the Inquisition under suspicion of insincerity; initially over 90% of the executions were of Jews, because the moriscos were too well-connected and too important to the government and economy to be maltreated. But after some decades the focus turned to moriscos (and Protestants), and finally all the moriscos were expelled without being allowed to take money or jewelry or anything more than they could carry.

The most advanced state in Europe was destroyed, and neither it nor the rest of Spain has ever fully recovered.

An ironic element is that, after 800 years of Islam in Spain, the Christians “were not actually expelling Arabs nor were they expelling Berbers. The huge majority of the people that were being expelled, by blood, by DNA if you will, were as Iberian as their Christian cousins in the North who were kicking them out of Peninsula”. This from British historian Professor Dwight Reynolds in a 2005 documentary.

The Muslims and Jews who were expelled took the keys to their front doors with them. Fifteen generations later, around the Mediterranean, many of those keys are still in the possession of the original families.