Tomás de Torquemada

Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498) was a Castilian Dominican friar, born at Valladolid, who became confessor and closest advisor to Queen Isabella I and supported her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469. After the Catholic Monarchs set up the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, Pope Sixtus IV made him an inquisitor in 1482 and first Grand Inquisitor in 1483.

He issued 28 articles guiding its tribunals and built a court network across Castile and Aragon. A driving force behind the Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelling Spain's Jews, he died at Ávila in 1498, his name a byword for persecution.