5 Horrifying Tactics Used Against Women in the Inquisition

PART 2:

 Subject shifts position every 11 minutes. Subject touches face four times in first hour. Subject’s breathing rate increases when footsteps approach door. They are not interrogating her. They are cataloging her. And here is the detail that reframes everything. Isabelle does not know it yet, but she has already failed three tests.

 Not tests of faith, tests of biology. To understand what happens to Isabelle, you need to understand what the Inquisition actually believed about the human body. In 1487, 9 years after the Inquisition’s founding, two inquisitors published a book called Maloose Maleficum, the Hammer of Witches. Most people know it as a witch hunting manual. And it is.

But buried in its pages is a theory that conversion to Christianity was not just spiritual but physiological. That when someone genuinely accepted Christ, their nervous system would change. Their tears would come easier during mass. Their pulse would quicken before the Eucharist.

 Their pupils would dilate at the sight of the Virgin. And if those responses did not happen, the body was remembering something else. By 1520, there were inquisition physicians employed not to heal but to measure. They had instruments, calipers for measuring pupil dilation, water clocks for timing pulse rates, graduated vials for collecting and measuring tears.

 In Seville in 1537, a tribunal spent 4 months testing this theory with 50 confirmed conversos and 50 old Christians, running both groups through identical religious exercises while measuring physical responses. The results, still in the archive, showed no consistent difference. None. But when one inquisitor wrote in the margin that their instruments detected nothing, he added one more sentence.

 continue observations, expand sample size. They knew their method did not work. By 1537, they had proof. They used it for another 150 years. It has now been 18 hours since Isabelle’s arrest. Finally, an inquisitor enters. His name is Alonzo de Mendoza. He has been doing this for 22 years.

 He carries a wooden case about the size of a prayer book and sits beside her close enough that she can smell the ink on his clothes. The questions start, but they are not about Judaism. Describe your wedding night, he says. Isabelle hesitates. She has been married 14 years. What does this have to do with heresy? Mendoza opens the case revealing a glass vial, a thin brass rod with millimeter markings, a small mirror. Did you weep? He asks.

 She answers no. He makes a note. Then he asks about her daughter’s birth, which saint she invoked, whether she felt ecstasy when the child first breathed. But he is not listening to her words. He is watching her corroted artery while a notary behind the screen times her pulse with a water clock.

 Then Mendoza does something that appears in dozens of Inquisition transcripts, but is almost never discussed. He takes out the mirror, holds it 6 in from Isabelle’s face, and asks her to look at the crucifix while he watches her reflection. He is looking at her pupils. The notation reads, “Subject’s pupils constricted when viewing crucifix.

Expected dilation absent. Expected by whom? Based on what?” There is no citation, just an assertion that Isabelle’s eyes should have responded differently. And here’s what makes this worse. Isabel knows what he is doing because by 1589 everyone knows. Converso, families have been teaching their daughters for two generations how to perform the right physical responses.

Cry when you take communion. Let your hands shake when you kiss the cross. Isabelle is 43 years old and she has spent 20 of those years making her body lie. It is still not enough. On the seventh day, Isabelle confesses. She admits everything, weeping genuinely now because she thinks this is over. Mendoza closes the ledger, tells her she will be moved to a different cell while they prepare her reconciliation ceremony.

 The door closes, and then he writes one sentence. Subject’s confession exhibits physiological inconsistency. It means Isabelle confessed wrong, not to the wrong things, but her body while confessing did not display the right responses. There was a checklist for grief. Isabelle cried, but not copiously enough.

 She trembled, but it did not spread from her hands to her torso, therefore not genuinely repentant, therefore eligible for execution. Isabel Diodora was executed on March 15th, 1591 in Toledo’s Plaza Dokadova before a crowd of 4,000 people. They read her crimes aloud, lighting candles on the Jewish Sabbath, refusing pork, teaching prayers to her daughter, and then confession lacking physiological consistency with genuine repentance, body failing to display adequate signs of divine grace.

 That is what killed her, not the candles, not the prayers, the fact that her pupils did not dilate correctly. They offered her a chance, even at the stake, to reconcile, to confess with the right physiological responses, and they would strangle her first before lighting the fire. Her mercy Isabelle confessed again, said everything they wanted to hear, but the notary recorded subjects confession delivered without adequate trembling.

Voice remained steady, eyes dry. They did not strangle her. They burned her conscious. Her daughter Anna was in the crowd, 9 years old, required by law to watch. 20 years later, when she herself was accused, Anna gave testimony that still exists. She said, “I learned that no truth could save her.

 I learned that I must teach my own body to lie more perfectly than she did. I learned that surviving meant becoming a stranger to my own flesh. Anna lived because she mastered the performance.” The Spanish Inquisition officially ended in 1834, but the method did not die. It appeared again in Salem in 1692 in Women Ducked in Water.

 Searched for marks that would not bleed. The logic survived that the body cannot lie, that flesh will always betray. That observation is evidence that your own nervous system is the enemy. Isabelle’s pupils were 4 mm when they should have been six. And for that crime of biology, she burned. This story moved you.

 If it made you think about the terrifying ways power can weaponize our own bodies against us, leave a comment below. What do you think about a system that made people fear their own tears, their own heartbeats? Share your thoughts because this history matters and remembering these women matters.