[flagged]
So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.
For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...
Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few centuries, with many others enslaved, imprisoned, driven out of the peninsula, or forcibly converted. Those who converted to Catholicism were rewarded with centuries of further discrimination and persecution. (Disclaimer: I am not expert enough to know detailed figures here; feel free to search for expert sources if you want something precise.)
Scattered lightning strikes are not meaningfully comparable to large-scale genocidal war.
Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not.
The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well.
[1] - https://xkcd.com/978/
As I said, I'm not an expert; and you are right, it's not easy to find good sources for numbers about this. As far as I can tell were quite a few individual events with tens of thousands of people killed at a time. There were hundreds of recorded major battles.
The only thing that's entirely clear is that it was very small scale for the overwhelming majority of the conflict, punctuated by a very small handful of "large" battles that would generally be considered moderate to small scale in modern times. There were certainly not hundreds of major battles. So I don't think anybody knows exactly how many were killed other than 'not that many.' Put another way - over some 700 years it's certain that far fewer people died than e.g. one large modern battle like the Battle of Stalingrad.
The greatest legacy of the era was defining, or at least solidifying, the character of Spain/Portugal and the more militant nature of Catholicism at the time. So for some context, Columbus would set sail for the New World just months after Grenada finally fell!
Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.
Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.
In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".
Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.
e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.
> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
> It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves
Seems tangential?
The Reconquista partially led to the Inquisition. The Reconquista started 711 and ended in 1492. How could it not be relevant?
Everything partially led to everything. We might as well talk how the Persian - Roman wars led to the Spanish Inquisition as well.
I actually spoke to a friend of mine who basically knows a huge amount of history (he is at University doing some sort Masters in a related subject), because some of the replies on this subject in sibling threads are so ignorant they actually gaslite me.
Instead repeating the same thing in multiple messages you might at some point consider saying HOW do you think they are related. Because yes its obvious that they are, on its own that is saying very little.
> ignorant they actually gaslite me.
Because its very hard to understand what specific points are you trying to make?
That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
A Mexican goes to Spain, accosts the first Spaniard he sees, and lays into him: “I demand an apology, sir - your ancestors pillaged my country!”
The Spaniard blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”
Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes.
That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find.
The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.
I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.