Place · religious tribunal site · India
The Goa Inquisition
Also known as The Goa Inquisition — Palácio do Sabaio
The Holy Office sat at Old Goa from 1560 to 1812, in the confiscated palace of the Adil Shahi governor, with jurisdiction over the whole Estado da Índia. It prosecuted converts suspected of keeping Hindu or Muslim practice, and Jews and New Christians who had come east to escape Iberian scrutiny.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.502, 73.912
Worth knowing
Its records were burned when it was abolished in 1812, so the scale is argued from indirect evidence: something over sixteen thousand cases are attested, with a few dozen burnings. The building was demolished and the site is an empty lawn, which is why the Inquisition is the least visible thing in Old Goa and the most written about.
Connections (6)
- CampaignChennamangalam & Parur synagogues
The Holy Office at Goa had jurisdiction over New Christians — converted Jews and their descendants — as well as over Hindu and Muslim converts, and its establishment in 1560 was pressed for partly by Francis Xavier on the ground that Jewish practice was continuing in the Estado. The Cochin and Parur communities on the Malabar coast lay outside Portuguese jurisdiction under local rajas, which is a large part of why they survived where Goa's did not.
- CampaignParadesi Synagogue, Kochi
The Holy Office at Goa held jurisdiction over Cochin, where the Malabar and Paradesi Jewish communities and the descendants of forced converts lived under Portuguese customs authority. Portuguese forces sacked the Jewish quarter and the synagogue in 1662; the Dutch took Cochin the following year and the community rebuilt under a power that did not run an Inquisition.
- CampaignChristianity
What European Christianity did on arrival is a different story from how the religion got here. The Inquisition sat at Goa from 1560 for two and a half centuries, prosecuting converts suspected of keeping Hindu practice, Jews and conversos, and the Synod of Diamper in 1599 forced the Syriac church into Roman obedience and burned its books. The oldest Christian community in India was among the things the newest arrivals came to correct.
- CampaignJudaism
The one persecution on Indian soil, and it was European. The Inquisition at Goa prosecuted Jews and conversos from 1560, and Portuguese action drove the old Malabar community out of Cranganore in the same century — which is why the Jews of the coast moved south to Cochin and put themselves under the Raja's protection. The persecution arrived by ship, and it was escaped by moving into an Indian ruler's jurisdiction.
- Alternative toOur Lady of Life, Mattancherry
The Goa Inquisition is what the oath was sworn against. Goa held the Padroado’s authority over all Christians east of the Cape, and had already used it on Indian converts and on the Syriac books and liturgy of Malabar after the Synod of Diamper in 1599. Mattancherry is the limit of that reach: a community large enough and old enough to refuse, fifty-four years later.
- Imperial administration ofEstado da Índia — Portuguese India
The Goa Inquisition was an arm of the Estado da Índia, run out of the Sabaio Palace in Old Goa from 1560 to 1812. It prosecuted Catholic converts suspected of retaining Hindu or Muslim practice, and its trials shaped Konkani Catholic caste and cuisine as much as they broke Konkani Hindu manuscripts and iconography. Repeated papal calls to end it failed until Napoleon abolished it, and the Portuguese crown restored and then quietly closed it in 1812.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Goa Inquisition”. Anant Kakba Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition (1961); the surviving Portuguese Inquisition correspondence, Historical Archives of Goa.
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