With the release of The Eye of Leviathan, we’re finally free to talk a bit more about what’s in the book!

. . . starting with the Inquisition.

We had a delicate path to walk here. On the one hand, the Inquisition features heavily in what’s called the “Black Legend,” a set of negative stereotypes about Spain in this era that continue to affect perceptions to this day. On the other hand, writing about Spain in this era and not accounting for the Inquisition would be a bit like writing about modern U.S. politics and not accounting for the influence of evangelical Christianity. Given that a tension between faerie things and Christianity is also baked into European lore, the notion that the Inquisition wouldn’t take a dangerous interest in our Otherworld and its peoples was implausible.

But the Inquisition isn’t quite what popular imagination makes it out to be. Ask the average person and they’ll probably say something about witch-burning; in reality, the Spanish Inquisition was founded to examine and enforce the religious orthodoxy of Jews who had converted to Christianity. Soon after that, all Jews in Spain were required to either convert or leave, at which point the Holy Office began doing huge business hunting down crypto-Jews. When a similar thing happened to the Moors later on, they also started looking for crypto-Muslims — and between and around those things, they also dealt with anything else considered a religious crime: heresy (which included Protestantism), sodomy, bigamy, blasphemy, and so forth.

What about faerie stuff? Our premise for the book assumes that Spain is readily acquiring and using magic from the Sea Beyond, so unless we handwaved the Inquisition offstage entirely, we couldn’t say their mandate was to quash those things. Instead, they police improper trafficking in faerie matters: acquiring, selling, or using magic you’re not supposed to have is a religious crime. (Which, naturally, means those things mostly accrue to the wealthy and powerful, who have more legal right to them than the average peasant.)

As for what they do when they find infractions . . . One of the big stereotypes of the Inquisition has to do with torture. But this is another place where the Black Legend rears its head, because the truth is, every law enforcement body in Europe back then engaged in torture. It wasn’t specifically a Spanish thing, or a Catholic thing, whatever Protestant propaganda in countries like England might have you believe. And while the Inquisition used that tool like everybody else, they had strict rules around its deployment; you might genuinely be tortured less by the Holy Office than by a secular authority.

What does distinguish the Inquisition in a sinister way is its pervasive secrecy. Nobody was allowed to talk about their processes (though of course word did leak out, and they kept extensive records of their own work, which is how we know anything now). If you were arrested, you weren’t told what you’d been arrested for; instead you were invited to confess everything you’d done wrong — with, of course, consequences if you didn’t admit whatever wrongdoing they’d already decided you were guilty of. You could get testimony against you stricken from the record if you could establish that the person who gave it had a grudge against you and might not be acting in good faith . . . but you weren’t allowed to know who the testimony was from, so good luck with that. There was no appeals process. Your defense lawyer was there to guide you in your confession, not to actually defend you. If they arrested you, they’d already decided you were guilty; everything after that was to establish just what you were guilty of, and what should be done about it.

And of course, as with any censorship regime, the goal was less to actively suppress everything unwanted — which takes a level of effort and resources the Holy Office never actually had, because no censorship regime ever does — and more to frighten people into suppressing themselves. To do nothing that might draw inquisitorial attention, or if you did it, to turn yourself in and confess so you could be let off with a lighter sentence. To denounce your neighbors if you saw them doing anything wrong, because seeing and not saying anything might itself be considered a crime.

Yet despite all that, this was also an organization run by people, with all the flaws that implies. In our research, we turned up gobsmacking stories about the Inquisition just acting like flagrant bullies, including breaking the law. In Valencia this technically had subsided by our period, but given the alternate nature of our history, we decided to let their bad behavior continue onward. So on the one hand you have the Holy Office as this sinister, secretive force . . . and on the other hand, you have them smuggling faerie contraband so they can profit on the side, and inquisitors getting into brawls with bishops over who occupies the best seat at a parade.

In short, our goal is be as even-handed as we can. Of course our changeling protagonist needs to be afraid of the Inquisition, but we want him to be afraid of the right things, not the stereotypes. And we want to counterbalance that with the moments when the Inquisition stops looking like this terrifying monolith and starts looking like a bunch of corrupt, arrogant guys, not much different from anybody else with power.

Because in the end, it’s power that’s the threat — not this one specific, famous instance of it.