The Inquisition’s bureaucracy-created financial needs drove it to persecute Moriscos

Evidence

It may appear strange that an institution with such immense powers as the Inquisition should have been prepared to strike messy exemption deals of this kind. From the point of view of the Inquisition itself, what recommended the situado and similar arrangements was that they went some way toward relieving and evening out the financial stresses that arose from the policy demands made on it by Church and state alike. When the Inquisition moved from being a small agency disciplining a few delinquent heretics to being a relatively large organization running large jails and meeting a range of staffing costs and other administrative overheads, such as any bureaucracy has to face, it began to need to assure for itself a steady source of income. Since one resource it had was the money coming from its prisoners (from sequestrated possessions, from fines and penalties imposed, among other things), it could easily pay its bills when sinners and backsliders were in good supply, but of course when they were not, the same fixed administrative overhead still needed to be covered. The Moriscos soon grasped that the Inquisition had a strong motive to continue to harass them and create ever more victims unless it could be bought off and assured a steady source of revenue. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1120

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverted incentive structures: an institution funded by its own victims’ confiscations becomes financially dependent on its victims’ continuing guilt — bureaucratic overhead creates an institutional motive to manufacture heresy.
• XREF: Connects to the moral-hazard economics of fine-funded policing/quota systems writ large — e.g., speeding-ticket quotas, asset-forfeiture programs funded by seizures. — connects to: The Spanish Inquisition was mainly political and economic domination in religious guise. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 117