A Sanbenito Preserved at Tui Cathedral
A penitential garment of the Spanish Inquisition, painted with the name, trade, offence and year of the person condemned. After the sentence it was hung in the parish church of the condemned, where it stayed — which made the punishment hereditary in everything but law.
The Inquisition under Philip II was a bureaucracy before it was anything else: a council in Madrid, tribunals in the provinces, a standard procedure, forms for denunciations, registers of the condemned, and a rule that records be kept. The sanbenito belongs to that machinery. Its function was administrative rather than penal — a permanent public record of impurity of blood, consulted for generations afterwards by anyone examining a family before an appointment or a marriage. See the Spanish Inquisition's administrative structure under Philip II.
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