In my imagination, the Inquisition, whereever it roamed, is just terribly brutal. Arbitrary arrests, unimaginably cruel torture methods... just spreading terror whereever it roamed.
But I read or heard somewhere that, apparently, it wasn't as bad as popular culture and media depictions would make it believe. What do the sources say? Was it all in all an abomination? Was it to try to contain the spread of protestantism?
A while ago there were a slew of questions on the inquisition, thanks in great part to the hatchet job Neil Degrasse Tyson's new Cosmos did on medieval history, inquisition, church and science. Below is an extract from some of my comments at the time with links to further posts about the subject to help frame the answers.
Admittedly I only deal with the ad hoc medieval inquisition and not the institutionalized Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. We shouldn't conflate them when we talk as they changed quite bit over time; moreover the Spanish inquisitions were created and lead by the monarchy, not the Church.
Much like historians of genocides, holocausts, dictatorships, and the like, historians of heresy and inquisition have a tough time finding an approach to these subjects which isn't moralizing and judgemental. And we have to avoid moralizing because the historian's work is not to judge events for the lessons it can provide (which is subject to interpretation), but to understand the events, peoples, motivations as they were (not as we hope them to be). The reader can then make their decision as to how to judge. As such, I can't determine for you or anyone if the inquisition was 'as bad as it's made out to be' because:
I don't know what you know about the medieval, renaissance and early modern contexts of Christian behaviour and attitudes, of 'law and order' and of corporal punishment
I don't know what you conceive of 'as bad as it's made out to be'
So, I want to help readers approach this subject through several aspects in order to come to their own conclusions not only about the inquisition, but how to understand the complexity of the subject and how it is used, both by the television show Cosmos, and by the editorials/calls to action of the Catholic League, and often by Redditors. We have to understand what is heresy, what is the inquisition, and whether there was a conflict between science and religion.
In the last 24 hours /r/AskHistorians has had many question provoked by the new Cosmos, and here are some things I've written to consider:
Carl Sagan's Cosmos and his history?
How dangerous was being a heretic?
How did one become an inquisitor?
Very recently, there are two other relevant posts which get into the Conflict Thesis, the so-called (imaginary) battle between Science and Christianity:
How common were witch burnings in the middle ages?
The question, then, of how bad the inquisition was depends on your relationship to expressions of authority and power. But here are some facts:
the medieval, Spanish, Roman, and Portuguese inquisitions were different in formulation and construction, and they exercised specific powers which sometimes were in common and sometimes diverged
these inquisitions, much like most interrogations of heresy, were often less about theology than they were about power, and in Foucault's words, control and discipline
the medieval inquisition, and the Roman Inquisition, were still guided by a principle of 'returning sheep to the flock': the evidence makes clear that recanting heterodox and heretical views led to lenient punishment (perhaps a pilgrimage to a local shrine, or requirements to attend mass and confession with exact frequency)
latter inquisitions did use torture, developed over time
all inquisitions did engage in corporal punishment and execution [administered by secular power], and those would not have seemed out of place on the battlefields and in the courts outside the doors of the self same churches and places of inquisition
Here are a few other related posts as well:
To what extent was torture criticized or objected to in the middle ages?