Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
So notorious was the Inquisition in Portuguese India that word
of its horrors even reached home. The archbishop of Evora, in
Portugal, eventually wrote, 'If everywhere the Inquisition was an
infamous court, the infamy, however base, however vile, however
corrupt and determined by worldly interests, it was never more so
than in Goa.'
And it went on for two hundred years, with one brief hiatus.
Fides
suadenda, non imponenda
(Faith must be the result of conviction and
should not be imposed by force), Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had
once stated, this becoming a church tenet during the early Middle
Ages. But Saint Bernard was a nephew of one of the original nine
Knights Templar and even championed this mystical order that
itself eventually became a casualty of the Inquisition in England
and France. Saint Bernard might have had more than a vested interest
in curtailing the persecution of heretics. In any case, such enlightened
attitudes generally had no effect.
The Portuguese viceroy in Goa happily condoned the burning of
far more so-called heretics than the number of Hindu widows he
saved from the funeral pyre by banning
sati
. Those subjected to
diabolical tortures could also be counted in the thousands, and the
abominations continued until a brief respite in 1774. Becoming a
senior minister in Portugal, the Marquis of Pombal, one of the few
great liberals in a most illiberal land, ordered the Inquisition
abolished. Four years later, he in turn was driven from his office,
and the evil immediately resumed, continuing, almost incredibly,
until June 16, 1812. At that point, British pressure put an end to the
terror, the presence of British troops stationed in Goa enforcing it.
During this period Portuguese power was finally waning, and the
old colony gradually crumbled into decay.
The Palace of the Grand Inquisitor was ordered demolished
around 1830, most of its stones removed to be used in buildings
then going up in the new capital of Panjim. The priests who turn
such a handsome profit on Saint Francis Xavier's bones today are
clearly happy to be rid of anything that might remind someone of
the Inquisition their saint had requested be sent to Goa.
One of the very last acts the tiny state's Portuguese rulers
performed was in 1960, erecting a bronze statue of their great poet
