Acts of Faith Celebrated by the Court of the Holy Office in Teruel (1485-1487)

Throughout the three brief but intense years of existence as district inquisitorial court (1485-87), Judges Juan de Çolivera and Martín Navarro summoned thirteen Acts of faith, involving about eighty individual, and affecting a high percentage of the adult population of the city. The vast majority belongs to the second generation of converts, that is, the descendants of those persons baptized on the occasion of the Dispute of Tortosa (1412-13). Held in the Plaza Mayor or in the church of Santa María, and although a definitive protocol has not yet been consolidated, they present a careful dramaturgy combining the pedagogy of fear, the demonization of heresy and the mental and power structure. Because of the adverse political conditions in which it was implemented, its sentences were very severe, being condemned to the death penalty 82% of the accused while in Zaragoza it’s reduced to 39%.