Spanish Inquisition vs Aztec sacrifices: the numbers don't add up
20,000 Aztec sacrifices a year compared to 826 executions by the Inquisition over 160 years. The historical data dismantle the usual comparison.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Spanish Inquisition vs Aztec sacrifices: the numbers don't add up
Comparing the Spanish Inquisition with pre-Hispanic human sacrifice has become a common way to downplay both atrocities. But when the figures are laid on the table, the balance tips so brutally that the comparison loses all meaning.
The number nobody wants to look at: 20,000 people a year
Academic estimates put Aztec sacrifices at around 20,000 people a year across the entire empire. At the inauguration of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlán alone, in 1487, chronicles and archaeological studies calculate that between 10,000 and 80,400 victims were killed in four days. It was not an exceptional ritual: it was a perfectly oiled system of state terror.
The Inquisition, a court with remarkably modest numbers
Against that, the most exhaustive data on the Spanish Inquisition — the study by Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras (1993) covering 44,674 trials between 1540 and 1700 — yields only 826 executions. The historian William Monter raises the figure to 1,250 between 1530 and 1730, an average of six deaths a year. And with a key caveat: the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over indigenous people; its number of native defendants was exactly zero.
The comparison, therefore, is not between two similar systems of violence. It is between a machine of mass extermination and a religious court which, for all its pavor, operated with a restraint its European contemporaries — the 5,000 Huguenots massacred on St Bartholomew's Day, for example — did not show.
Why does the myth persist?
The answer probably has more to do with the Black Legend than with historical reality. Projecting onto Spain the brutality of other European kingdoms is more comfortable than accepting that the Mexica empire practiced ritual genocide on an industrial scale. Or perhaps, as some analyses suggest, the persistence of the narrative stems from the fact that acknowledging the magnitude of Aztec sacrifice forces a rethink of the entire story of the conquest. The data are there. What is missing is the will to look at them.
Comparing the Spanish Inquisition with pre-Hispanic human sacrifice has become a common way to downplay both atrocities. But when the figures are laid on the table, the balance tips so brutally that the comparison loses all meaning.
The number nobody wants to look at: 20,000 people a year
Academic estimates put Aztec sacrifices at around 20,000 people a year across the entire empire. At the inauguration of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlán alone, in 1487, chronicles and archaeological studies calculate that between 10,000 and 80,400 victims were killed in four days. It was not an exceptional ritual: it was a perfectly oiled system of state terror.
The Inquisition, a court with remarkably modest numbers
Against that, the most exhaustive data on the Spanish Inquisition — the study by Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras (1993) covering 44,674 trials between 1540 and 1700 — yields only 826 executions. The historian William Monter raises the figure to 1,250 between 1530 and 1730, an average of six deaths a year. And with a key caveat: the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over indigenous people; its number of native defendants was exactly zero.
The comparison, therefore, is not between two similar systems of violence. It is between a machine of mass extermination and a religious court which, for all its pavor, operated with a restraint its European contemporaries — the 5,000 Huguenots massacred on St Bartholomew's Day, for example — did not show.
Why does the myth persist?
The answer probably has more to do with the Black Legend than with historical reality. Projecting onto Spain the brutality of other European kingdoms is more comfortable than accepting that the Mexica empire practiced ritual genocide on an industrial scale. Or perhaps, as some analyses suggest, the persistence of the narrative stems from the fact that acknowledging the magnitude of Aztec sacrifice forces a rethink of the entire story of the conquest. The data are there. What is missing is the will to look at them.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (10 replies).
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