Goa Inquisition
What was the Goa Inquisition?
Who was targeted by the Goa Inquisition?
How did the Goa Inquisition affect the local population?
Goa Inquisition, judicial institution orchestrated by the kingdom of Portugal in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, intended to combat supposed heresy among converts to Christianity and suppress local Hinduism and Islam. It lasted from 1560 to 1812, save for a brief suspension from 1774 to 1778, and was an extension of the Portuguese Inquisition. The total number of people that inquisitors targeted, sentenced, or executed was in the thousands, which precipitated a drastic decline in the non-Christian population of Goa.
Historical background
Vasco de Gama journeyed for the Portuguese crown to the western coast of India, first reaching India in 1498 and landing near Goa in 1499. Goa became the first territorial possession of the Portuguese in Asia and was established when Afonso de Albuquerque conquered and claimed it for Portugal in 1510. It was won for Portugal from Yūsuf ʿĀdil Shah (called Hidalcão or Idalcão by the Portuguese), the founder of the ʿĀdil Shāhī dynasty. Albuquerque and his initial successors left almost untouched the customs and constitutions of local communities, abolishing only the rite of sati (widow burning).
The Goa Inquisition that began nearly half a century later was an Indian extension of the Portuguese Inquisition—which was a branch of the Spanish Inquisition—that started in Portugal before it was exported to the colonies. King Manuel I of Portugal, as a precondition of his marriage in 1497 to Isabella (the daughter of Ferdinand II and Isabella of Spain), was expected to expel the Jews, many thousands of whom had been admitted to Portugal by King John II after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. In December 1496 Manuel I ordered Jews and Muslims to quit Portugal within 10 months. When members of these religious groups assembled in Lisbon, every attempt was made to coerce their conversion. Some were allowed to leave Portugal, but the rest were forcibly converted under the promise that no inquiry would be made into their beliefs for 20 years. Those Portuguese and Spanish Jews who converted and were baptized were called New Christians (Portuguese: Cristão-Novos; Spanish: Cristiano Nuevos), or also called conversos (converted people); they were derogatorily called Marranos.
Many New Christians fled to Goa to escape the oppressive environment in Portugal, but antisemitism soon followed them. New Christians were suspected of continuing to practice Judaism in secret, and many likely were indeed Crypto-Jews. In February 1519 Manuel I prohibited New Christians from being named to the positions of judge or councilor in Goa. In 1532 he then made New Christian emigration from Portugal a capital offense. The formal tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition was established in Lisbon in 1540, 20 years before the formal founding of the Goa Inquisition, but its activities to suppress religion in Goa had already begun. Records indicate two New Christians were lynched with clerical approval in Goa in 1539 and 1543. On March 8, 1546, John III ordered the Portuguese viceroy in Goa to destroy Hindu temples and to put a stop to Hindu practices, including the worship and construction of idols and the celebration of Hindu festivals in all Portuguese holdings in India. He also commanded the eviction of Brahmins (the Hindu priestly class) from Portuguese territory in India.
The Christian missionary Francis Xavier (later St. Francis Xavier, the patron saint of Goa’s Christian community), wrote to John III on May 16, 1546, requesting an Inquisition in the Portuguese Indies to punish “many who shamelessly and without fear of God live by the Mosaic Law [Judaism] and the Moorish sect [Islam]” (quoted in António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians 1536–1765 [2001]). However, no formal Inquisition in Goa was put in place for nearly 15 years.
Establishment and activities
The Goa Inquisition, formally the Goa Tribunal of the Portuguese Holy Office, was established on March 2, 1560. It was headquartered in Panaji, Goa, in what had been the viceroy’s residence, called Sabaio Palace, which had previously belonged to Yūsuf ʿĀdil Shah. The Goa Inquisition had a special judicial status under the Portuguese crown. The tribunal had inquisitorial authority over all other territories in the Portuguese East Indies. The highest Portuguese officials in Goa were exempt from it, but even they could be tried with special permission.
The original focus of the Inquisition was on New Christian immigrants to Goa from Portugal who were believed to be practicing Judaism in secret, but it soon expanded to include non-Christians, non-Catholic Christians, and Indian converts to Christianity suspected of secretly observing Hinduism or Islam. Records show that Portuguese New Christians made up 9 percent of convicted persons from 1561 to 1623 but are hardly present in the record from 1590 onward. However, New Christians made up 69 percent of all those executed. The Portuguese tried to target Thomas Christians, an Indigenous Christian group living predominantly in Kerala prior to the arrival of Europeans and whose practices differed significantly from Portuguese Catholicism. However, since many of the Thomas Christians lived outside of Goan territory, and they were anyway under the protection of the Syrian patriarch of the Assyrian Church, the inquisitors had little recourse to try them for heresy.
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The Goa Inquisition held its first auto-da-fé (“act of faith,” a public form of sentencing during the Inquisition) in 1562; twenty-seven such events are recorded until 1623, during which 3,800 people were sentenced. From 1600 to 1773, 71 autos-da-fé were recorded during which more than 4,000 people were sentenced, of which 57 were executed and 64 executed in effigy. Putting those figures in context, the total population of Goa in the 1580s was approximately 60,000 people, a third of them Hindus. The number of those investigated and sentenced could be even higher: Trial records up until 1774 totaled more than 13,000.
Other decrees impacting the colonized Indian community accompanied the Inquisition. A decree in 1556 called for all Hindu children under 14 whose fathers had died to be baptized and converted to Catholicism. After complaints from the Hindu community, this rule was altered in 1559 to restrict it to children without parents or grandparents. Hiding such children from the authorities made one liable for arrest. Records from the late 17th and early 18th centuries reveal that some supposed orphans from Hindu families had living mothers, but children (and family assets) were seized by Catholic authorities nonetheless, without those impacted having any legal recourse to reclaim their children. In 1567 all qadis (Muslim judges) were ordered to leave Portuguese territories in India. In 1573 Hindu members of Christian-majority villages had their rights curtailed. Hundreds of Hindu temples were burned before and during the Goa Inquisition, and statues of Hindu gods (murtis) were replaced with crosses.
Crimes under the Goa Inquisition included practicing one’s original faith and festivals in secret, speaking in the native Konkani language, and worshipping idols. Also outlawed were cultural practices such as playing local musical instruments or wearing a pudvem, a lower-body clothing worn by men in Goa that is a local version of the dhoti. The list of offenses also included preventing others from converting to Catholicism, providing refuge to non-Christians, and helping Christian converts escape from Goa.
Most punishments included confinement and imprisonment, flogging, galley service, and banishment. Punishments for non-Catholic victims, which were limited to flogging or banishment, were often forgiven in lieu of conversion. Victims sentenced to be executed were strangulated, burnt at the stake, or burned in effigy, but such harsh sentences were the minority of cases. Forced mass conversion did not occur during the Goa Inquisition; nonetheless the Inquisition was used as a tool to repress the local population. The threat of denunciation served to extort both Catholics and non-Catholics, and wealthy families were a frequent target for financial more than religious reasons.
The Goa Inquisition was abolished by the Marquis de Pombal—a Portuguese reformer and virtual ruler of his country from 1750 to 1777—on February 10, 1774, and all prisoners were released. The Inquisition began anew on April 4, 1778, after Pombal’s fall from power the previous year. Yet by the early 19th century the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula was waning. The Goa Inquisition lasted until June 16, 1812, when it finally came to an end by royal order.