A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India c19.222

c19.222

¹ Writing in 1675, the traveller Fryer relates what he saw of the Inquisition at Goa. I take the following from his Letter iv., chapter ii. “Going the next Morning to the Palace-Stairs, we saw their Sessions-House, the bloody Prison of the Inquisition; and in a principal Market-place was raised an Engine a great height, at top like a Gibbet, with a Pulley, with steppings to go upon, as on a Flagstaff, for the Strapado, which unhinges a Man’s joints; a cruel Torture. Over against these Stairs is an Island where they burn . . . all those condemned by the Inquisitor, which are brought from the Sancto Officio dress’d up in most horrid Shapes of Imps and Devils, and so delivered to the executioner. . . . St. Jago, or St. James’s Day, is the Day for the Aucto de Fie.” And in chapter v. of the same Letter he states that, when he was at Goa, “all Butcher’s Meat was forbidden, except Pork”—a regulation irksome enough even to the European residents, but worse for those Hindus allowed by their caste rules to eat meat, but to whom pork is always especially distasteful. Linschoten, who was in India from 1583 to 1589, mentions the imprisonments and tortures inflicted on the Hindus by the Inquisition (vol. ii. pp. 158-227).