The Goa inquisition: being a quatercentenary commemoration study of the inquisition in India, 2nd reprint

J.C. BARRETO MIRANDA, a Goan historian, speaks of this Holy office: 'The cruelties which in the name of the religion of peace and love this tribunal practised in Europe, were carried to even greater excesses in India, where the Inquisitors, surrounded by luxuries which could stand comparison with the regal magnificence of the great potentates of Asia, saw with pride the Archbishop as well as the viceroy submitted to their power. Every word of theirs was a sentence to death and at their slightest nod were moved to terror the vast population spread d been over the Asiatic regions, whose lives fluctuated in their hands, and who, on the most frivolous pretext could be clapped for all time in the deepest dungeons or strangled or offered as food for the flames of the pyre.' THE GOA INQUISITION was established in 1560 as recommended earlier by St. Francis Xavier, and finally abolished in 1812. Although its headquarters were at Goa, its jurisdiction extended to entire Portuguese possessions to the East of the Cape of Good Hope, and it had its Commissaries in other major centres. It was started originally to punish Christian converts from Judaism, but next it turned its attention to native converts to Christianity from other faiths, almost all of whom had been converted by threat of force or material rewards.