title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Some authors, such as Thomas William Walsh, stated that the entire process was undertaken with the utmost secrecy, as much for the public as for the accused, who were not informed about the accusations that were levied against them. Months or even years could pass without the accused being informed about why they were imprisoned. The prisoners remained isolated, and, during this time, the prisoners were not allowed to attend Mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of the Inquisition were no worse than those of secular authorities, and there are even certain testimonies that occasionally they were much better. There are few records of the time of the accused in prison, but the transcription of the trials repeatedly shows the accused being informed of every charge during the trial. They also show the accused's answers, in which they address each accusation specifically. Given that they would be informed anyway, it makes little sense that the accused would be kept in the dark prior to the trial, unless the investigation was still open.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The inquisitorial process consisted of a series of hearings, in which both the denouncers and the defendant gave testimony. A defense counsel was assigned to the defendant, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage them to speak the truth. The prosecution was directed by the "fiscal". Interrogation of the defendant was done in the presence of the "Notary of the Secreto", who meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: To defend themselves, the accused had two choices: "abonos" (to find favourable witnesses, akin to "substantive" evidence/testimony in Anglo-American law) or "tachas" (to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers were not trustworthy, akin to Anglo-American "impeachment" evidence/testimony).


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The documentation from the notary usually show the following content, which gives us an idea of what the actual trial was likely to look like:


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Regarding the fairness of the trials, the structure of them was similar to modern trials and extremely advanced for the time. The Inquisition was dependent on the political power of the King. The lack of separation of powers allows assuming questionable fairness for certain scenarios. The fairness of the Inquisitorial tribunals seemed to be among the best in early modern Europe when it came to the trial of laymen. There are also testimonies by former prisoners that, if believed, suggest that said fairness was less than ideal when national or political interests were involved.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: To obtain a confession or information relevant to an investigation, the Inquisition used torture, but not in a systematic way. It could only be applied when all other options, witnesses and experts had been used, the accused was found guilty or most likely guilty, and relevant information regarding accomplices or specific details were missing. It was applied mainly against those suspected of Judaizing and Protestantism beginning in the 16th century, in other words, "enemies of the state", since said crimes were usually thought to be associated with a larger organized network of either espionage or conspiracy with foreign powers. For example, Lea estimates that between 1575 and 1610 the court of Toledo tortured approximately a third of those processed for Protestant heresy. The recently opened Vatican Archives suggest even lower numbers. In other periods, the proportions varied remarkably. Torture was always a means to obtain the confession of the accused, not a punishment itself.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Torture was employed in all civil and religious trials in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition used it more restrictively than was common at the time. Its main differentiation characteristic was that, as opposed to both civil trials and other inquisitions, it had very strict regulations regarding when, what, to whom, how many times, for how long and under what supervision it could be applied. The Spanish inquisition engaged in it far less often and with greater care than other courts. In the civil court, both Spanish and otherwise, there was no restriction regarding duration or any other point.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Per contrast, European civil trials from England to Italy and from Spain to Russia could use, and did use, torture without justification and for as long as they considered. So much so that there were serious tensions between the Inquisition and Philip III, since the Inquisitors complained that "those people sent to the prisons of the King blasphemed and accused themselves of heresy just to be sent under the Inquisitorial jurisdiction instead of the King's" and that was collapsing the Inquisition's tribunals. During the reign of Philip IV there were registered complaints of the Inquisitors about people who "Blasphemated, mostly in winter, just to be detained and fed inside the prison".


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Despite some popular accounts, modern historians state that torture was only ever used to confirm information or a confession, not for punitive reasons.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Rafael Sabatinni states that among the methods of torture allowed, and common in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals, were "garrucha", "toca" and the "potro", even though those claims contradict both the Inquisitorial law and the claims made by Kamen. The application of the "garrucha", also known as the strappado, consisted of suspending the victim from the ceiling by the wrists, which are tied behind the back. Sometimes weights were tied to the ankles, with a series of lifts and drops, during which the arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The use of the "toca"(cloth), also called "interrogatorio mejorado del agua" (enhanced water interrogation), is better documented. It consisted of forcing the victim to ingest water poured from a jar so that they had the impression of drowning. The "potro", the rack, in which the limbs were slowly pulled apart, was thought to be the instrument of torture used most frequently.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The assertion that "confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum" (literally: '[a person's] confession is truth, not made by way of torture') sometimes follows a description of how, after torture had ended, the subject freely confessed to the offences. Thus confessions following torture were deemed to be made of the confessor's free will, and hence valid.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Once the process concluded, the inquisidores met with a representative of the bishop and with the "consultores" (consultants), experts in theology or Canon Law (but not necessarily clergy themselves), which was called the "consulta de fe" (faith consultation/religion check). The case was voted and sentence pronounced, which had to be unanimous. In case of discrepancies, the "Suprema" had to be informed.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Frequently, cases were judged "in absentia", and when the accused died before the trial finished, the condemned were burned in effigy.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The distribution of the punishments varied considerably over time. It is believed that sentences of death were enforced in the first stages within the long history of the Inquisition. According to García Cárcel, the court of Valencia, one of the most active, employed the death penalty in 40% of the convicts before 1530, but later that percentage dropped to 3%. By the middle of the 16th century, inquisition courts viewed torture as unnecessary and death sentences had become rare.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: If the sentence was condemnatory, this implied that the condemned had to participate in the ceremony of an "auto de fe" (more commonly known in English as an "auto-da-fé") that solemnized their return to the Church (in most cases), or punishment as an impenitent heretic. The "autos-da-fé" could be private ("auto particular") or public ("auto publico" or "auto general").


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Although initially the public "autos" did not have any special solemnity nor sought a large attendance of spectators, with time they became solemn ceremonies, celebrated with large public crowds, amidst a festive atmosphere. The "auto-da-fé" eventually became a baroque spectacle, with staging meticulously calculated to cause the greatest effect among the spectators. The "autos" were conducted in a large public space (frequently in the largest plaza of the city), generally on holidays. The rituals related to the "auto" began the previous night (the "procession of the Green Cross") and sometimes lasted the whole day. The "auto-da-fé" frequently was taken to the canvas by painters: one of the better-known examples is the 1683 painting by Francisco Rizi, held by the Prado Museum in Madrid that represents the "auto" celebrated in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on 30 June 1680. The last public "auto-da-fé" took place in 1691.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The "auto-da-fé" involved a Catholic Mass, prayer, a public procession of those found guilty, and a reading of their sentences. They took place in public squares or esplanades and lasted several hours; ecclesiastical and civil authorities attended. Artistic representations of the "auto-da-fé" usually depict torture and the burning at the stake. This type of activity never took place during an "auto-da-fé", which was in essence a religious act. Torture was not administered after a trial concluded, and executions were always held after and separate from the "auto-da-fé", though in the minds and experiences of observers and those undergoing the confession and execution, the separation of the two might be experienced as merely a technicality.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The first recorded "auto-da-fé" was held in Paris in 1242, during the reign of Louis IX. The first Spanish "auto-da-fé" did not take place until 1481 in Seville; six of the men and women subjected to this first religious ritual were later executed. The Inquisition had limited power in Portugal, having been established in 1536 and officially lasting until 1821, although its influence was much weakened with the government of the Marquis of Pombal in the second half of the 18th century. "Autos-da-fé" also took place in Mexico, Brazil and Peru: contemporary historians of the Conquistadors such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo record them. They also took place in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, following the establishment of Inquisition there in 1562–1563.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The arrival of the Enlightenment in Spain slowed inquisitorial activity. In the first half of the 18th century, 111 were condemned to be burned in person, and 117 in effigy, most of them for judaizing. In the reign of Philip V, there were 125 "autos-da-fé", while in the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only 44.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: During the 18th century, the Inquisition changed: Enlightenment ideas were the closest threat that had to be fought. The main figures of the Spanish Enlightenment were in favour of the abolition of the Inquisition, and many were processed by the Holy Office, among them Olavide, in 1776; Iriarte, in 1779; and Jovellanos, in 1796; Jovellanos sent a report to Charles IV in which he indicated the inefficiency of the Inquisition's courts and the ignorance of those who operated them: "... friars who take [the position] only to obtain gossip and exemption from the choir; who are ignorant of foreign languages, who only know a little scholastic theology."


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: In its new role, the Inquisition tried to accentuate its function of censoring publications but found that Charles III had secularized censorship procedures, and, on many occasions, the authorization of the Council of Castile hit the more intransigent position of the Inquisition. Since the Inquisition itself was an arm of the state, being within the Council of Castile, civil rather than ecclesiastical censorship usually prevailed. This loss of influence can also be explained because the foreign Enlightenment texts entered the peninsula through prominent members of the nobility or government, influential people with whom it was very difficult to interfere. Thus, for example, Diderot's Encyclopedia entered Spain thanks to special licenses granted by the king.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: After the French Revolution the Council of Castile, fearing that revolutionary ideas would penetrate Spain's borders, decided to reactivate the Holy Office that was directly charged with the persecution of French works. An Inquisition edict of December 1789, that received the full approval of Charles IV and Floridablanca, stated that:


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: having news that several books have been scattered and promoted in these kingdoms... that, without being contented with the simple narration events of a seditious nature... seem to form a theoretical and practical code of independence from the legitimate powers... destroying in this way the political and social order... the reading of thirty and nine French works is prohibited, under fine...


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: However, inquisitorial activity was impossible in the face of the information avalanche that crossed the border; in 1792, "the multitude of seditious papers... does not allow formalizing the files against those who introduce them".


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The fight from within against the Inquisition was almost always clandestine. The first texts that questioned the Inquisition and praised the ideas of Voltaire or Montesquieu appeared in 1759. After the suspension of pre-publication censorship on the part of the Council of Castile in 1785, the newspaper "El Censor" began the publication of protests against the activities of the Holy Office by means of a rationalist critique. Valentin de Foronda published "Espíritu de los Mejores Diarios", a plea in favour of freedom of expression that was avidly read in the salons. Also, in the same vein, Manuel de Aguirre wrote On Toleration in "El Censor", "El Correo de los Ciegos" and "El Diario de Madrid".


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: During the reign of Charles IV of Spain (1788–1808), in spite of the fears that the French Revolution provoked, several events accelerated the decline of the Inquisition. The state stopped being a mere social organizer and began to worry about the well-being of the public. As a result, the land-holding power of the Church was reconsidered, in the "señoríos" and more generally in the accumulated wealth that had prevented social progress. The power of the throne increased, under which Enlightenment thinkers found better protection for their ideas. Manuel Godoy and Antonio Alcalá Galiano were openly hostile to an institution whose only role had been reduced to censorship and was the very embodiment of the Spanish Black Legend, internationally, and was not suitable to the political interests of the moment:


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The Inquisition? Its old power no longer exists: the horrible authority that this bloodthirsty court had exerted in other times was reduced... the Holy Office had come to be a species of commission for book censorship, nothing more...


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The Inquisition was first abolished during the domination of Napoleon and the reign of Joseph Bonaparte (1808–1812). In 1813, the liberal deputies of the Cortes of Cádiz also obtained its abolition, largely as a result of the Holy Office's condemnation of the popular revolt against French invasion. But the Inquisition was reconstituted when Ferdinand VII recovered the throne on 1 July 1814. Juan Antonio Llorente, who had been the Inquisition's general secretary in 1789, became a Bonapartist and published a critical history in 1817 from his French exile, based on his privileged access to its archives.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Possibly as a result of Llorente's criticisms, the Inquisition was once again temporarily abolished during the three-year Liberal interlude known as the Trienio liberal, but still the old system had not yet had its last gasp. Later, during the period known as the Ominous Decade, the Inquisition was not formally re-established, although, "de facto", it returned under the so-called Congregation of the Meetings of Faith, tolerated in the dioceses by King Ferdinand. On 26 July 1826, the "Meetings of Faith" Congregation condemned and executed the school teacher Cayetano Ripoll, who thus became the last person known to be executed by the Inquisition.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: On that day, Ripoll was hanged in Valencia, for having taught deist principles. This execution occurred against the backdrop of a European-wide scandal concerning the despotic attitudes still prevailing in Spain. Finally, on 15 July 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was definitively abolished by a Royal Decree signed by regent Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand VII's liberal widow, during the minority of Isabella II and with the approval of the President of the Cabinet Francisco Martínez de la Rosa. (It is possible that something similar to the Inquisition acted during the 1833–1839 First Carlist War, in the zones dominated by the Carlists, since one of the government measures praised by Conde de Molina Carlos Maria Isidro de Borbon was the re-implementation of the Inquisition to protect the Church). During the Carlist Wars, it was the conservatives who fought the liberals who wanted to reduce the Church's power, amongst other reforms to liberalize the economy. It can be added that Franco during the Spanish Civil War is alleged to have stated that he would attempt to reintroduce it, possibly as a sop to Vatican approval of his coup.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The Alhambra Decree that had expelled the Jews was formally rescinded on 16 December 1968 by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, after the Second Vatican Council rejected the idea that Jews are deicides.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The prohibitions, persecution and eventual Jewish mass emigration from Spain and Portugal probably had adverse effects on the development of the Spanish and the Portuguese economy. Jews and Non-Catholic Christians reportedly had substantially better numerical skills than the Catholic majority, which might be due to the Jewish religious doctrine, which focused strongly on education, for example because Torah-Reading was compulsory. Even when Jews were forced to quit their highly skilled urban occupations, their numeracy advantage persisted. However, during the inquisition, spillover-effects of these skills were rare because of forced separation and Jewish emigration, which was detrimental for economic development.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: It is unknown exactly how much wealth was confiscated from converted Jews and others tried by the Inquisition. Wealth confiscated in one year of persecution in the small town of Guadaloupe paid the costs of building a royal residence. There are numerous records of the opinion of ordinary Spaniards of the time that "the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people". "They were burnt only for the money they had", a resident of Cuenca averred. "They burn only the well-off", said another. In 1504 an accused stated, "only the rich were burnt". In 1484 Catalina de Zamora was accused of asserting that "this Inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith. It is the goods that are the heretics." This saying passed into common usage in Spain. In 1524 a treasurer informed Charles V that his predecessor had received ten million ducats from the conversos, but the figure is unverified. In 1592 an inquisitor admitted that most of the fifty women he arrested were rich. In 1676, the Suprema claimed it had confiscated over 700,000 ducats for the royal treasury (which was paid money only after the Inquisition's own budget, amounting in one known case to only 5%). The property on Mallorca alone in 1678 was worth "well over 2,500,000 ducats".


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: García Cárcel estimates that the total number prosecuted by the Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000; applying the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of 1560–1700—about 2%—the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to death. Nevertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed. Other authors disagree and estimate a max death toll between 1% and 5%, (depending on the time span used) combining all the processes the inquisition carried, both religious and non-religious ones. In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000).


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of the Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National Historical Archive of Spain (Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the annual relations of all processes between 1540 and 1700. This material provides information for approximately 44,674 judgments. These 44,674 cases include 826 executions "in persona" and 778 "in effigie" (i.e. an effigy was burned). This material is far from being complete—for example, the tribunal of Cuenca is entirely omitted, because no "relaciones de causas" from this tribunal have been found, and significant gaps concern some other tribunals (e.g., Valladolid). Many more cases not reported to the Suprema are known from the other sources (i.e., no "relaciones de causas" from Cuenca have been found, but its original records have been preserved), but were not included in Contreras-Henningsen's statistics for the methodological reasons. William Monter estimates 1000 executions between 1530 and 1630 and 250 between 1630 and 1730.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The archives of the Suprema only provide information about processes prior to 1560. To study the processes themselves, it is necessary to examine the archives of the local tribunals, the majority of which have been lost to the devastation of war, the ravages of time or other events. Some archives have survived including those of Toledo, where 12,000 were judged for offences related to heresy, mainly minor "blasphemy", and those of Valencia. These indicate that the Inquisition was most active in the period between 1480 and 1530 and that during this period the percentage condemned to death was much more significant than in the years that followed. Modern estimates show approximately 2,000 executions "in persona" in the whole of Spain up to 1530.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The statistics of Henningsen and Contreras are based entirely on "relaciones de causas". The number of years for which cases are documented varies for different tribunals. Data for the Aragonese Secretariat are probably complete, some small lacunae may concern only Valencia and possibly Sardinia and Cartagena, but the numbers for Castilian Secretariat—except Canaries and Galicia—should be considered as minimal due to gaps in the documentation. In some cases it is remarked that the number does not concern the whole period 1540–1700.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Table of sentences pronounced in the public "autos da fe" in Spain (excluding tribunals in Sicily, Sardinia and Latin America) between 1701 and 1746:


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Author Toby Green notes that the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law" and sometimes had motives for imprisoning and sometimes executing alleged offenders other than for the purpose of punishing religious nonconformity, mainly in Hispanoamerica and Iberoamerica.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios about one Inquisitor, Diego Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two different women he then kept as mistresses. According to Barrios


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: the daughter of Diego Celemin was exceptionally beautiful, her parents and her husband did not want to give her to [Lucero], and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now has a child by her, and he has kept for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Defenders of the Inquisition discrediting with Green are many and seem to be the growing trend in current scholarship. These authors do not necessarily deny the abuses of power but classify them as politically instigated and comparable to those of any other law enforcement body of the period. Criticisms, usually indirect, have gone from the suspiciously sexual overtones or similarities of these accounts with unrelated older antisemitic accounts of kidnap and torture, to the clear proofs of control that the king had over the institution, to the sources used by Green, or just by reaching completely different conclusions.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The context of Hispano America, that Green refers to often, was different from the Iberian context studied for many of those authors, due to the distance from the immediate executive power of the King, and deserves to be examined separately. Among those who do, there are also discrediting voices regarding the nature and extent of the Inquisition's abuses.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: According to a 2021 study, "municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational attainment, and trust today."


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: How historians and commentators have viewed the Spanish Inquisition has changed over time and continues to be a source of controversy. Before and during the 19th-century historical interest focused on who was being persecuted. In the early and mid 20th century, historians examined the specifics of what happened and how it influenced Spanish history. In the later 20th and 21st century, historians have re-examined how severe the Inquisition really was, calling into question some of the assumptions made in earlier periods.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Before the rise of professional historians in the 19th century, the Spanish Inquisition had largely been portrayed by Protestant scholars who saw it as the archetypal symbol of Catholic intolerance and ecclesiastical power. The Spanish Inquisition for them was largely associated with the persecution of Protestants, or inexplicably, of witches. William H. Prescott described the Inquisition as an "eye that never slumbered". Despite the existence of extensive documentation regarding the trials and procedures, and to the Inquisition's deep bureaucratization, none of these sources were studied outside of Spain, and Spanish scholars arguing against the predominant view were automatically dismissed. The 19th-century professional historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador de los Ríos, were the first to successfully challenge this perception in the international sphere and get foreign scholars to make eco of their discoveries. Said scholars would obtain international recognition and start a period of revision on the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the groundbreaking "History of the Inquisition in Spain". This influential work describes the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of progress." Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation in no uncertain terms, calling it "theocratic absolutism" at its worst. In the context of the polarization between Protestants and Catholics during the second half of the 19th century, some of Lea's contemporaries, as well as most modern scholars thought Lea's work had an anti-Catholic bias.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Starting in the 1920s, Jewish scholars picked up where Lea's work left off. They published Yitzhak Baer's "History of the Jews in Christian Spain", Cecil Roth's "History of the Marranos" and, after World War II, the work of Haim Beinart, who for the first time published trial transcripts of cases involving conversos.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Contemporary historians who subscribe to the idea that the image of the Inquisition in historiography has been systematically deformed by the Black Legend include Edward Peters, Philip Wayne Powell, William S. Maltby, Richard Kagan, Margaret R. Greer, Helen Rawlings, Ronnie Hsia, Lu Ann Homza, Stanley G. Payne, Andrea Donofrio, Irene Silverblatt, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Charles Gibson, and Joseph Pérez. Contemporary historians who support the traditional view and deny the existence of a Black Legend include Toby Green. Contemporary historians who partially accept an impact of the Black Legend but deny other aspects of the hypothesis it includes Henry Kamen, David Nirenberg and Karen Armstrong.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The works of Juderias in (1913) and other Spanish scholars prior to him were mostly ignored by international scholarship until 1960.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: One of the first books to build on them and internationally challenge the classical view was "The Spanish Inquisition" (1965) by Henry Kamen. Kamen argued that the Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or as powerful as commonly believed. The book was very influential and largely responsible for subsequent studies in the 1970s to try to quantify (from archival records) the Inquisition's activities from 1480 to 1834. Those studies showed there was an initial burst of activity against conversos suspected of relapsing into Judaism, and a mid-16th century pursuit of Protestants, but the Inquisition served principally as a forum Spaniards occasionally used to humiliate and punish people they did not like: blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners and, in Aragon, homosexuals, and horse smugglers. Kamen went on to publish two more books in 1985 and 2006 that incorporated new findings, further supporting the view that the Inquisition was not as bad as once described by Lea and others. Along similar lines is Edward Peters's "Inquisition" (1988).


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: One of the most important works about the inquisition's relation to the Jewish conversos or New Christians is "The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain" (1995/2002) by Benzion Netanyahu. It challenges the view that most conversos were actually practicing Judaism in secret and were persecuted for their crypto-Judaism. Rather, according to Netanyahu, the persecution was fundamentally racial, and was a matter of envy of their success in Spanish society. This view has been challenged multiple times, and with some reasonable divergences the majority of historians either align with religious causes or with merely cultural ones, with no significant racial element.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: Challenging some of the claims of revisionist historians is Toby Green in "Inquisition, the Reign of Fear", who calls the claim by revisionists that torture was only rarely applied by inquisitors, a "worrying error of fact".


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The literature of the 18th century approaches the theme of the Inquisition from a critical point of view. In "Candide" by Voltaire, the Inquisition appears as the epitome of intolerance and arbitrary justice in Europe.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: During the Romantic Period, the Gothic novel, which was primarily a genre developed in Protestant countries, frequently associated Catholicism with terror and repression. This vision of the Spanish Inquisition appears in, among other works, "The Monk" (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (set in Madrid during the Inquisition, but can be seen as commenting on the French Revolution and the Terror); "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin and "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa" by Polish author Jan Potocki.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The literature of the 19th century tends to focus on the element of torture employed by the Inquisition. In France, in the early 19th century, the epistolary novel "Cornelia Bororquia, or the Victim of the Inquisition", which has been attributed to Spaniard Luiz Gutiérrez, and is based on the case of María de Bohórquez, ferociously criticizes the Inquisition and its representatives. The Inquisition also appears in one of the chapters of the novel "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which imagines an encounter between Jesus and the Inquisitor General. One of the best-known stories of Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum", explores the use of torture by the Inquisition.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The Inquisition also appears in 20th-century literature. "La Gesta del Marrano", by the Argentine author Marcos Aguinis, portrays the length of the Inquisition's arm to reach people in Argentina during the 16th and 17th centuries. The first book in Les Daniels' "Don Sebastian Vampire Chronicles", "The Black Castle" (1978), is set in 15th-century Spain and includes both descriptions of Inquisitorial questioning and an auto-da-fé, as well as Tomás de Torquemada, who is featured in one chapter. The Marvel Comics series "Marvel 1602" shows the Inquisition targeting Mutants for "blasphemy". The character Magneto also appears as the Grand Inquisitor. The Captain Alatriste novels by the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte are set in the early 17th century. The second novel, "Purity of Blood", has the narrator being tortured by the Inquisition and describes an auto-da-fé. Carme Riera's novella, published in 1994, "Dins el Darrer Blau" ("In the Last Blue") is set during the repression of the "chuetas" ("conversos" from Majorca) at the end of the 17th century. In 1998, the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes published the historical novel "The Heretic", about the Protestants of Valladolid and their repression by the Inquisition. Samuel Shellabarger's "Captain from Castile" deals directly with the Spanish Inquisition during the first part of the novel.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: In the novel La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falcones, published in 2006 and set in the 14th century, there are scenes of inquisition investigations in small towns and a great scene in Barcelona.


title: Spanish Inquisition

text: The Spanish Inquisition is a recurring trope that makes an occasional appearance in the British parliament, similar to calling something "nazi," to reject ideas seen as religiously authoritarian.


title: Red Army

text: The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия), often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established in January 1918. The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations (especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army) of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. Starting in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name of "Soviet Army", until its dissolution in 1991.


title: Red Army

text: The Red Army provided the largest land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II, and its invasion of Manchuria assisted the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan. During operations on the Eastern Front, it accounted for 75–80% of casualties the "Wehrmacht" and "Waffen-SS" suffered during the war and ultimately captured the Nazi German capital, Berlin.


title: Red Army

text: In September 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote: "There is only one way to prevent the restoration of the police, and that is to create a people's militia and to fuse it with the army (the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the entire people)." At the time, the Imperial Russian Army had started to collapse. Approximately 23% (about 19 million) of the male population of the Russian Empire were mobilized; however, most of them were not equipped with any weapons and had support roles such as maintaining the lines of communication and the base areas. The Tsarist general Nikolay Dukhonin estimated that there had been 2 million deserters, 1.8 million dead, 5 million wounded and 2 million prisoners. He estimated the remaining troops as numbering 10 million.


title: Red Army

text: While the Imperial Russian Army was being taken apart, "it became apparent that the rag-tag Red Guard units and elements of the imperial army who had gone over the side of the Bolsheviks were quite inadequate to the task of defending the new government against external foes." Therefore, the Council of People's Commissars decided to form the Red Army on 28 January 1918. They envisioned a body "formed from the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes." All citizens of the Russian republic aged 18 or older were eligible. Its role being the defense "of the Soviet authority, the creation of a basis for the transformation of the standing army into a force deriving its strength from a nation in arms, and, furthermore, the creation of a basis for the support of the coming Socialist Revolution in Europe." Enlistment was conditional upon "guarantees being given by a military or civil committee functioning within the territory of the Soviet Power, or by party or trade union committees or, in extreme cases, by two persons belonging to one of the above organizations." In the event of an entire unit wanting to join the Red Army, a "collective guarantee and the affirmative vote of all its members would be necessary." Because the Red Army was composed mainly of peasants, the families of those who served were guaranteed rations and assistance with farm work. Some peasants who remained at home yearned to join the Army; men, along with some women, flooded the recruitment centres. If they were turned away they would collect scrap metal and prepare care-packages. In some cases the money they earned would go towards tanks for the Army.


title: Red Army

text: The Council of People's Commissars appointed itself the supreme head of the Red Army, delegating command and administration of the army to the Commissariat for Military Affairs and the Special All-Russian College within this commissariat. Nikolai Krylenko was the supreme commander-in-chief, with Aleksandr Myasnikyan as deputy. Nikolai Podvoisky became the commissar for war, Pavel Dybenko, commissar for the fleet. Proshyan, Samoisky, Steinberg were also specified as people's commissars as well as Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich from the Bureau of Commissars. At a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, held on 22 February 1918, Krylenko remarked: "We have no army. The demoralized soldiers are fleeing, panic-stricken, as soon as they see a German helmet appear on the horizon, abandoning their artillery, convoys and all war material to the triumphantly advancing enemy. The Red Guard units are brushed aside like flies. We have no power to stay the enemy; only an immediate signing of the peace treaty will save us from destruction."


title: Red Army

text: At the start of the civil war, the Red Army consisted of 299 infantry regiments. The civil war intensified after Lenin dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly (5–6 January 1918) and the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), removing Russia from the Great War. Free from international war, the Red Army confronted an internecine war against a variety of opposing anti-Bolshevik forces, including the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, the "Black Army" led by Nestor Makhno, the anti-White and anti-Red Green armies, efforts to restore the defeated Provisional Government, monarchists, but mainly the White Movement of several different anti-socialist military confederations. "Red Army Day", 23 February 1918, has a two-fold historical significance: it was the first day of drafting recruits (in Petrograd and Moscow), and the first day of combat against the occupying Imperial German Army.


title: Red Army

text: The Red Army also fought against national independence movements in the territory of the former Russian Empire, including three military campaigns against the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, in January–February 1918, January–February 1919, and May–October 1920.


title: Red Army

text: In June 1918, Trotsky abolished workers' control over the Red Army, replacing the election of officers with traditional army hierarchies and criminalizing dissent with the death penalty. Simultaneously, Trotsky carried out a mass recruitment of officers from the old Imperial Russian Army, who were employed as military specialists ("voenspetsy", ). Lev Glezarov's special commission recruited and screened them. The Bolsheviks occasionally enforced the loyalty of such recruits by holding their families as hostages. As a result of this initiative, in 1918 75% of the officers were former tsarists. By mid-August 1920 the Red Army's former Tsarist personnel included 48,000 officers, 10,300 administrators, and 214,000 NCOs. When the civil war ended in 1922, ex-Tsarists constituted 83% of the Red Army's divisional and corps commanders.


title: Red Army

text: On 6 September 1918 the Bolshevik militias consolidated under the supreme command of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (). The first chairman was Leon Trotsky, and the first commander-in-chief was Jukums Vācietis from the Latvian Riflemen; in July 1919 he was replaced by Sergey Kamenev. Soon afterwards Trotsky established the GRU (military intelligence) to provide political and military intelligence to Red Army commanders. Trotsky founded the Red Army with an initial Red Guard organization and a core soldiery of Red Guard militiamen and Chekist secret police. Conscription began in June 1918, and opposition to it was violently suppressed. To control the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Red Army soldiery, the Cheka operated special punitive brigades which suppressed anti-communists, deserters, and "enemies of the state".


title: Red Army

text: The Red Army used special regiments for ethnic minorities, such as the Dungan Cavalry Regiment commanded by the Dungan Magaza Masanchi. The Red Army also co-operated with armed Bolshevik Party-oriented volunteer units, the Части особого назначения – ЧОН (special task units – "chasti osobogo naznacheniya" – or ChON) from 1919 to 1925.


title: Red Army

text: The slogan "exhortation, organization, and reprisals" expressed the discipline and motivation which helped ensure the Red Army's tactical and strategic success. On campaign, the attached Cheka Special Punitive Brigades conducted summary field courts-martial and executions of deserters and slackers. Under Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin the Special Punitive Brigades took hostages from the villages of deserters to compel their surrender; one in ten of those returning was executed. The same tactic also suppressed peasant rebellions in areas controlled by the Red Army, the biggest of these being the Tambov Rebellion. The Soviets enforced the loyalty of the various political, ethnic, and national groups in the Red Army through political commissars attached at the brigade and regimental levels. The commissars also had the task of spying on commanders for political incorrectness. Political commissars whose Chekist detachments retreated or broke in the face of the enemy earned the death penalty. In August 1918, Trotsky authorized General Mikhail Tukhachevsky to place blocking units behind politically unreliable Red Army units, to shoot anyone who retreated without permission. In 1942, during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) Joseph Stalin reintroduced the blocking policy and penal battalions with Order 227.


title: Red Army

text: The Red Army controlled by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic invaded and annexed non-Russian lands helping to create the Soviet Union.


title: Red Army

text: The Soviet westward offensive of 1918–19 occurred at the same time as the general Soviet move into the areas abandoned by the Ober Ost garrisons that were being withdrawn to Germany following the end of World War I. This merged into the 1919–1921 Polish–Soviet War, in which the Red Army reached central Poland in 1920, but then suffered a defeat there, which put an end to the war. During the Polish Campaign the Red Army numbered some 6.5 million men, many of whom the Army had difficulty supporting, around 581,000 in the two operational fronts, western and southwestern. Around 2.5 million men and women were mobilized in the interior as part of reserve armies.


title: Red Army

text: The XI Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RCP (b)) adopted a resolution on the strengthening of the Red Army. It decided to establish strictly organized military, educational and economic conditions in the army. However, it was recognized that an army of 1,600,000 would be burdensome. By the end of 1922, after the Congress, the Party Central Committee decided to reduce the Red Army to 800,000. This reduction necessitated the reorganization of the Red Army's structure. The supreme military unit became corps of two or three divisions. Divisions consisted of three regiments. Brigades as independent units were abolished. The formation of departments' rifle corps began.


title: Red Army

text: After four years of warfare, the Red Army's defeat of Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel in the south in 1920


title: Red Army

text: allowed the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. Historian John Erickson sees 1 February 1924, when Mikhail Frunze became head of the Red Army staff, as marking the ascent of the general staff, which came to dominate Soviet military planning and operations. By 1 October 1924 the Red Army's strength had diminished to 530,000. The list of Soviet Union divisions 1917–1945 details the formations of the Red Army in that time.


title: Red Army

text: In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Soviet military theoreticians – led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky – developed the deep-operations doctrine, a direct consequence of their experiences in the Polish-Soviet War and in the Russian Civil War. To achieve victory, deep operations envisage simultaneous corps- and army-size unit maneuvers of simultaneous parallel attacks throughout the depth of the enemy's ground forces, inducing catastrophic defensive failure. The deep-battle doctrine relies upon aviation and armor advances with the expectation that maneuver warfare offers quick, efficient, and decisive victory. Marshal Tukhachevsky said that aerial warfare must be "employed against targets beyond the range of infantry, artillery, and other arms. For maximum tactical effect aircraft should be employed en masse, concentrated in time and space, against targets of the highest tactical importance."


title: Red Army

text: Red Army deep operations found their first formal expression in the 1929 Field Regulations, and became codified in the 1936 Provisional Field Regulations (PU-36). The Great Purge of 1937–1939 and the Purge of 1940–1942 removed many leading officers from the Red Army, including Tukhachevsky himself and many of his followers, and the doctrine was abandoned. Thus at the Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938 and in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 (major border clashes with the Imperial Japanese Army), the doctrine was not used. Only in the Second World War did deep operations come into play.


title: Red Army

text: The Red Army was involved in armed conflicts in the Republic of China during the Sino-Soviet conflict (1929), the Soviet Invasion of Xinjiang (1934), when it was assisted by White Russian forces, and the Xinjiang rebellion (1937) in Northwest China. The Red Army achieved its objectives; it maintained effective control over the Manchurian Chinese Eastern Railway, and successfully installed a pro-Soviet regime in Xinjiang.


title: Red Army

text: The Soviet–Japanese border conflicts, also known as the "Soviet-Japanese Border War" or the first “Soviet-Japanese War”, was a series of minor and major conflicts fought between the Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan from 1932 to 1939. Japan's expansion into Northeast China created a common border between Japanese controlled areas and the Soviet Far East and Mongolia. The Soviets and Japanese, including their respective client states of the Mongolian People's Republic and Manchukuo, disputed the boundaries and accused the other side of border violations. This resulted in a series of escalating border skirmishes and punitive expeditions, including the 1938 Battle of Lake Khasan, and culminated in the Red Army finally achieving a Soviet-Mongolian victory over Japan and Manchukuo at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in September 1939. The Soviet Union and Japan agreed to a cease-fire. Later the two sides signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact on 13 April 1941, which resolved the dispute and returned the borders to "status quo ante bellum".


title: Red Army

text: The Winter War (, , ) was a war between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939—three months after the start of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union on 14 December 1939.


title: Red Army

text: The Soviet forces led by Semyon Timoshenko had three times as many soldiers as the Finns, thirty times as many aircraft, and a hundred times as many tanks. The Red Army, however, had been hindered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of 1937, reducing the army's morale and efficiency shortly before the outbreak of the fighting. With over 30,000 of its army officers executed or imprisoned, most of whom were from the highest ranks, the Red Army in 1939 had many inexperienced senior officers. Because of these factors, and high commitment and morale in the Finnish forces, Finland was able to resist the Soviet invasion for much longer than the Soviets expected. Finnish forces inflicted stunning losses on the Red Army for the first three months of the war while suffering very few losses themselves.


title: Red Army

text: Hostilities ceased in March 1940 with the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty. Finland ceded 9% of its pre-war territory and 30% of its economic assets to the Soviet Union. Soviet losses on the front were heavy, and the country's international reputation suffered. The Soviet forces did not accomplish their objective of the total conquest of Finland but did receive territory in Karelia, Petsamo, and Salla. The Finns retained their sovereignty and improved their international reputation, which bolstered their morale in the Continuation War (also known as the "Second Soviet-Finnish War") which was a conflict fought by Finland and Germany against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944.


title: Red Army

text: In accordance with the Soviet-Nazi Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, the Red Army invaded Poland on 17 September 1939, after the Nazi invasion on 1 September 1939. On 30 November the Red Army also attacked Finland, in the Winter War of 1939–1940. By autumn 1940, after conquering its portion of Poland, Nazi Germany shared an extensive border with USSR, with whom it remained neutrally bound by their non-aggression pact and trade agreements. Another consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, carried out by the Southern Front in June–July 1940 and Soviet occupation of the Baltic states (1940). These conquests also added to the border the Soviet Union shared with Nazi-controlled areas. For Adolf Hitler, the circumstance was no dilemma, because the "Drang nach Osten" ("Drive towards the East") policy secretly remained in force, culminating on 18 December 1940 with "Directive No. 21, Operation Barbarossa", approved on 3 February 1941, and scheduled for mid-May 1941.


title: Red Army

text: When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army's ground forces had 303 divisions and 22 separate brigades (5.5 million soldiers) including 166 divisions and brigades (2.6 million) garrisoned in the western military districts. The Axis forces deployed on the Eastern Front consisted of 181 divisions and 18 brigades (3 million soldiers). Three Fronts, the Northwestern, Western, and Southwestern conducted the defense of the western borders of the USSR. In the first weeks of the Great Patriotic War, the "Wehrmacht" defeated many Red Army units. The Red Army lost millions of men as prisoners and lost much of its pre-war matériel. Stalin increased mobilization, and by 1 August 1941, despite 46 divisions lost in combat, the Red Army's strength was 401 divisions.


title: Red Army

text: The Soviet forces were apparently unprepared despite numerous warnings from a variety of sources. They suffered much damage in the field because of mediocre officers, partial mobilization, and an incomplete reorganization. The hasty pre-war forces expansion and the over-promotion of inexperienced officers (owing to the purging of experienced officers) favored the "Wehrmacht" in combat. The Axis's numeric superiority rendered the combatants' divisional strength approximately equal. A generation of Soviet commanders (notably Georgy Zhukov) learned from the defeats, and Soviet victories in the Battle of Moscow, at Stalingrad, Kursk and later in Operation Bagration proved decisive.


title: Red Army

text: In 1941, the Soviet government raised the bloodied Red Army's "esprit de corps" with propaganda stressing the defense of Motherland and nation, employing historic exemplars of Russian courage and bravery against foreign aggressors. The anti-Nazi "Great Patriotic War" was conflated with the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon, and historical Russian military heroes, such as Alexander Nevski and Mikhail Kutuzov, appeared. Repression of the Russian Orthodox Church temporarily ceased, and priests revived the tradition of blessing arms before battle.


title: Red Army

text: To encourage the initiative of Red Army commanders, the CPSU temporarily abolished political commissars, reintroduced formal military ranks and decorations, and introduced the Guards unit concept. Exceptionally heroic or high-performing units earned the Guards title (for example 1st Guards Special Rifle Corps, 6th Guards Tank Army), an elite designation denoting superior training, materiel, and pay. Punishment also was used; slackers, malingerers, those avoiding combat with self-inflicted wounds cowards, thieves, and deserters were disciplined with beatings, demotions, undesirable/dangerous duties, and summary execution by NKVD punitive detachments.


title: Red Army

text: At the same time, the "osobist" (NKVD military counter-intelligence officers) became a key Red Army figure with the power to condemn to death and to spare the life of any soldier and (almost any) officer of the unit to which he was attached. In 1942, Stalin established the penal battalions composed of "gulag" inmates, Soviet PoWs, disgraced soldiers, and deserters, for hazardous front-line duty as "tramplers" clearing Nazi minefields, et cetera. Given the dangers, the maximum sentence was three months. Likewise, the Soviet treatment of Red Army personnel captured by the "Wehrmacht" was especially harsh. Per a 1941 Stalin directive, Red Army officers and soldiers were to "fight to the last" rather than surrender; Stalin stated: "There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors". During and after World War II freed POWs went to special "filtration camps". Of these, by 1944, more than 90% were cleared, and about 8% were arrested or condemned to serve in penal battalions. In 1944, they were sent directly to reserve military formations to be cleared by the NKVD. Further, in 1945, about 100 filtration camps were set for repatriated POWs, and other displaced persons, which processed more than 4,000,000 people. By 1946, 80% civilians and 20% of POWs were freed, 5% of civilians, and 43% of POWs were re-drafted, 10% of civilians and 22% of POWs were sent to labor battalions, and 2% of civilians and 15% of the POWs (226,127 out of 1,539,475 total) were transferred to the Gulag.


title: Red Army

text: During the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army conscripted 29,574,900 men in addition to the 4,826,907 in service at the beginning of the war. Of this total of 34,401,807 it lost 6,329,600 killed in action (KIA), 555,400 deaths by disease and 4,559,000 missing in action (MIA) (most captured). Of these 11,444,000, however, 939,700 rejoined the ranks in the subsequently liberated Soviet territory, and a further 1,836,000 returned from German captivity. Thus the grand total of losses amounted to 8,668,400. This is the official total dead, but other estimates give the number of total dead up to almost 11 million men, including 7.7 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million POW dead (out of 5.2 million total POWs), plus 400,000 paramilitary and Soviet partisan losses. The majority of the losses, excluding POWs, were ethnic Russians (5,756,000), followed by ethnic Ukrainians (1,377,400). However, as many as 8 million of the 34 million mobilized were non-Slavic minority soldiers, and around 45 divisions formed from national minorities served from 1941 to 1943.


title: Red Army

text: The German losses on the Eastern Front consisted of an estimated 3,604,800 KIA/MIA within the 1937 borders plus 900,000 ethnic Germans and Austrians outside the 1937 border (included in these numbers are men listed as missing in action or unaccounted for after the war) and 3,576,300 men reported captured (total 8,081,100); the losses of the German satellites on the Eastern Front approximated 668,163 KIA/MIA and 799,982 captured (total 1,468,145). Of these 9,549,245, the Soviets released 3,572,600 from captivity after the war, thus the grand total of the Axis losses came to an estimated 5,976,645. Regarding prisoners of war, both sides captured large numbers and had many die in captivity – one recent British figure says 3.6 of 6 million Soviet POWs died in German camps, while 300,000 of 3 million German POWs died in Soviet hands.


title: Red Army

text: In 1941 the rapid progress of the initial German air and land attacks into the Soviet Union made Red Army logistical support difficult because many depots (and most of the USSR's industrial manufacturing base) lay in the country's invaded western areas, obliging their re-establishment east of the Ural Mountains. Lend-Lease trucks and jeeps from the USA began appearing in large numbers in 1942. Until then the Red Army was often required to improvise or go without weapons, vehicles, and other equipment. The 1941 decision to physically move their manufacturing capacity east of the Ural mountains kept the main Soviet support system out of German reach. In the later stages of the war, the Red Army fielded some excellent weaponry, especially artillery and tanks. The Red Army's heavy KV-1 and medium T-34 tanks outclassed most "Wehrmacht" armor, but in 1941 most Soviet tank units used older and inferior models.


title: Red Army

text: While the Soviets considered the surrender of Germany to be the end of the “Great Patriotic War", at the earlier Yalta Conference the Soviet Union agreed to enter the Pacific Theater portion of World War II within three months of the end of the war in Europe. This promise was reaffirmed at the Potsdam Conference held in July 1945.


title: Red Army

text: The Red Army began the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August 1945 (three days after the first atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the same day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, while also being exact three months after the surrender of Germany). It was the largest campaign of the Soviet–Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace following the 1932-1939 Soviet-Japanese border conflicts. The Red Army, with support from Mongolian forces, overwhelmed the Japanese Kwantung Army and local Chinese forces supporting them. The Soviets advanced on the continent into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, Mengjiang (the northeast section of present-day Inner Mongolia which was part of another puppet state) and via an amphibious operation the northern portion of Korea. Other Red Army operations included the Soviet invasion of South Sakhalin, which was the Japanese portion of Sakhalin Island (and Russia had lost to Japan in 1905 in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War), and the invasion of the Kuril Islands. Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan on 15 August. The commanding general of the Kwantung Army ordered a surrender the following day although some Japanese units continued to fight for several more days. A proposed Soviet invasion of Hokkaido, the second largest Japanese island, was originally planned to be part of the territory to be taken but it was cancelled.


title: Red Army

text: Military administration after the October Revolution was taken over by the People's Commissariat of War and Marine affairs headed by a collective committee of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, Pavel Dybenko, and Nikolai Krylenko. At the same time, Nikolay Dukhonin was acting as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief after Alexander Kerensky fled from Russia. On 12 November 1917 the Soviet government appointed Krylenko as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, and because of an "accident" during the forceful displacement of the commander-in-chief, Dukhonin was killed on 20 November 1917. Nikolai Podvoisky was appointed as the Narkom of War Affairs, leaving Dybenko in charge of the Narkom of Marine Affairs and Ovseyenko – the expeditionary forces to the Southern Russia on 28 November 1917. The Bolsheviks also sent out their own representatives to replace front commanders of the Russian Imperial Army.


title: Red Army

text: After the signing of Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, a major reshuffling took place in the Soviet military administration. On 13 March 1918 the Soviet government accepted the official resignation of Krylenko and the post of Supreme Commander-in-Chief was liquidated. On 14 March 1918 Leon Trotsky replaced Podvoisky as the Narkom of War Affairs. On 16 March 1918 Pavel Dybenko was relieved from the office of Narkom of Marine Affairs. On 8 May 1918 the All-Russian Chief Headquarters was created, headed by Nikolai Stogov and later Alexander Svechin.


title: Red Army

text: On 2 September 1918 the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) was established as the main military administration under Leon Trotsky, the Narkom of War Affairs. On 6 September 1918 alongside the chief headquarters the Field Headquarters of RMC was created, initially headed by Nikolai Rattel. On the same day the office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces was created, and initially assigned to Jukums Vācietis (and from July 1919 to Sergey Kamenev). The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces existed until April 1924, the end of Russian Civil War.


title: Red Army

text: In November 1923, after the establishment of the Soviet Union, the Russian Narkom of War Affairs was transformed into the Soviet Narkom of War and Marine Affairs.


title: Red Army

text: At the beginning of its existence, the Red Army functioned as a voluntary formation, without ranks or insignia. Democratic elections selected the officers. However, a decree of 29 May 1918 imposed obligatory military service for men of ages 18 to 40. To service the massive draft, the Bolsheviks formed regional military commissariats ("voyennyy komissariat", abbr. "voyenkomat"), which as of 2006 still exist in Russia in this function and under this name. Military commissariats, however, should not be confused with the institution of military political commissars.


title: Red Army

text: In the mid-1920s the territorial principle of manning the Red Army was introduced. In each region able-bodied men were called up for a limited period of active duty in territorial units, which constituted about half the army's strength, each year, for five years. The first call-up period was for three months, with one month a year thereafter. A regular cadre provided a stable nucleus. By 1925 this system provided 46 of the 77 infantry divisions and one of the eleven cavalry divisions. The remainder consisted of regular officers and enlisted personnel serving two-year terms. The territorial system was finally abolished, with all remaining formations converted to the other cadre divisions, in 1937–1938.


title: Red Army

text: The Soviet military received ample funding and was innovative in its technology. An American journalist wrote in 1941:


title: Red Army

text: Under Stalin's campaign for mechanization, the army formed its first mechanized unit in 1930. The 1st Mechanized Brigade consisted of a tank regiment, a motorized infantry regiment, as well as reconnaissance and artillery battalions. From this humble beginning, the Soviets would go on to create the first operational-level armored formations in history, the 11th and 45th Mechanized Corps, in 1932. These were tank-heavy formations with combat support forces included so they could survive while operating in enemy rear areas without support from a parent front.


title: Red Army

text: Impressed by the German campaign of 1940 against France, the Soviet People's Commissariat of Defence (Defence Ministry, Russian abbreviation NKO) ordered the creation of nine mechanized corps on 6 July 1940. Between February and March 1941 the NKO ordered another twenty to be created. All of these formations were larger than those theorized by Tukhachevsky. Even though the Red Army's 29 mechanized corps had an authorized strength of no less than 29,899 tanks by 1941, they proved to be a paper tiger. There were actually only 17,000 tanks available at the time, meaning several of the new mechanized corps were badly under strength. The pressure placed on factories and military planners to show production numbers also led to a situation where the majority of armored vehicles were obsolescent models, critically lacking in spare parts and support equipment, and nearly three-quarters were overdue for major maintenance. By 22 June 1941 there were only 1,475 of the modern T-34s and KV series tanks available to the Red Army, and these were too dispersed along the front to provide enough mass for even local success. To illustrate this, the 3rd Mechanized Corps in Lithuania was formed up of a total of 460 tanks; 109 of these were newer KV-1s and T-34s. This corps would prove to be one of the lucky few with a substantial number of newer tanks. However, the 4th Army was composed of 520 tanks, all of which were the obsolete T-26, as opposed to the authorized strength of 1,031 newer medium tanks. This problem was universal throughout the Red Army, and would play a crucial role in the initial defeats of the Red Army in 1941 at the hands of the German armed forces.


title: Red Army

text: War experience prompted changes to the way frontline forces were organised. After six months of combat against the Germans, the Stavka abolished the rifle corps which was intermediate between the army and division level because, while useful in theory, in the state of the Red Army in 1941, they proved ineffective in practice. Following the decisive victory in the Battle of Moscow in January 1942, the high command began to reintroduce rifle corps into its more experienced formations. The total number of rifle corps started at 62 on 22 June 1941, dropped to six by 1 January 1942, but then increased to 34 by February 1943, and 161 by New Year's Day 1944. Actual strengths of front-line rifle divisions, authorised to contain 11,000 men in July 1941, were mostly no more than 50% of establishment strengths during 1941, and divisions were often worn down, because of continuous operations, to hundreds of men or even less.


title: Red Army

text: On the outbreak of war, the Red Army deployed mechanised corps and tank divisions whose development has been described above. The initial German attack destroyed many and, in the course of 1941, virtually all of them,(barring two in the Transbaikal Military District). The remnants were disbanded. It was much easier to coordinate smaller forces, and separate tank brigades and battalions were substituted. It was late 1942 and early 1943 before larger tank formations of corps size were fielded to employ armour in mass again. By mid-1943, these corps were being grouped together into tank armies whose strength by the end of the war could be up to 700 tanks and 50,000 men.


title: Red Army

text: The Bolshevik authorities assigned to every unit of the Red Army a political commissar, or "politruk", who had the authority to override unit commanders' decisions if they ran counter to the principles of the Communist Party. Although this sometimes resulted in inefficient command according to most historians, the Party leadership considered political control over the military absolutely necessary, as the army relied more and more on officers from the pre-revolutionary Imperial period and understandably feared a military coup. This system was abolished in 1925, as there were by that time enough trained Communist officers to render the counter-signing unnecessary.


title: Red Army

text: The early Red Army abandoned the institution of a professional officer corps as a "heritage of tsarism" in the course of the Revolution. In particular, the Bolsheviks condemned the use of the word "officer" and used the word "commander" instead. The Red Army abandoned epaulettes and ranks, using purely functional titles such as "Division Commander", "Corps Commander" and similar titles. Insignia for these functional titles existed, consisting of triangles, squares and rhombuses (so-called "diamonds").


title: Red Army

text: In 1924 (2 October) "personal" or "service" categories were introduced, from K1 (section leader, assistant squad leader, senior rifleman, etc.) to K14 (field commander, army commander, military district commander, army commissar and equivalent). Service category insignia again consisted of triangles, squares and rhombuses, but also rectangles (1 – 3, for categories from K7 to K9).


title: Red Army

text: On 22 September 1935 the Red Army abandoned service categories and introduced personal ranks. These ranks, however, used a unique mix of functional titles and traditional ranks. For example, the ranks included "Lieutenant" and "Comdiv" (Комдив, Division Commander). Further complications ensued from the functional and categorical ranks for political officers (e.g., "brigade commissar", "army commissar 2nd rank"), for technical corps (e.g., "engineer 3rd rank," "division engineer"), and for administrative, medical and other non-combatant branches.


title: Red Army

text: The Marshal of the Soviet Union (Маршал Советского Союза) rank was introduced on 22 September 1935. On 7 May 1940 further modifications to rationalise the system of ranks were made on the proposal by Marshal Voroshilov: the ranks of "General" and "Admiral" replaced the senior functional ranks of Combrig, Comdiv, Comcor, Comandarm in the Red Army and Flagman 1st rank etc. in the Red Navy; the other senior functional ranks ("division commissar," "division engineer," etc.) remained unaffected. The arm or service distinctions remained (e.g. general of cavalry, marshal of armoured troops). For the most part the new system restored that used by the Imperial Russian Army at the conclusion of its participation in World War I.


title: Red Army

text: In early 1943 a unification of the system saw the abolition of all the remaining functional ranks. The word "officer" became officially endorsed, together with the use of epaulettes, which superseded the previous rank insignia. The ranks and insignia of 1943 did not change much until the last days of the USSR; the contemporary Russian Army uses largely the same system.


title: Red Army

text: During the Civil War the commander cadres were trained at the Nicholas General Staff Academy of the Russian Empire, which became the Frunze Military Academy in the 1920s. Senior and supreme commanders were trained at the Higher Military Academic Courses, renamed the Advanced Courses for Supreme Command in 1925. The 1931 establishment of an Operations Faculty at the Frunze Military Academy supplemented these courses. The General staff Academy was reinstated on 2 April 1936, and became the principal military school for the senior and supreme commanders of the Red Army.


title: Red Army

text: The late 1930s saw purges of the Red Army leadership which occurred concurrently with Stalin's Great Purge of Soviet society. In 1936 and 1937, at the orders of Stalin, thousands of Red Army senior officers were dismissed from their commands. The purges had the objective of cleansing the Red Army of the "politically unreliable elements," mainly among higher-ranking officers. This inevitably provided a convenient pretext for the settling of personal vendettas or to eliminate competition by officers seeking the same command. Many army, corps, and divisional commanders were sacked: most were imprisoned or sent to labor camps; others were executed. Among the victims was the Red Army's primary military theorist, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was perceived by Stalin as a potential political rival. Officers who remained soon found all of their decisions being closely examined by political officers, even in mundane matters such as record-keeping and field training exercises. An atmosphere of fear and unwillingness to take the initiative soon pervaded the Red Army; suicide rates among junior officers rose to record levels. The purges significantly impaired the combat capabilities of the Red Army. Hoyt concludes "the Soviet defense system was damaged to the point of incompetence" and stresses "the fear in which high officers lived." Clark says, "Stalin not only cut the heart out of the army, he also gave it brain damage." Lewin identifies three serious results: the loss of experienced and well-trained senior officers; the distrust it caused among potential allies especially France; and the encouragement it gave Germany.


title: Red Army

text: Recently declassified data indicate that in 1937, at the height of the Purges, the Red Army had 114,300 officers, of whom 11,034 were dismissed. In 1938, the Red Army had 179,000 officers, 56% more than in 1937, of whom a further 6,742 were dismissed. In the highest echelons of the Red Army the Purges removed 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army generals, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 army corps generals, 154 out of 186 division generals, all 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.


title: Red Army

text: The result was that the Red Army officer corps in 1941 had many inexperienced senior officers. While 60% of regimental commanders had two years or more of command experience in June 1941, and almost 80% of rifle division commanders, only 20% of corps commanders, and 5% or fewer army and military district commanders, had the same level of experience.


title: Red Army

text: The significant growth of the Red Army during the high point of the purges may have worsened matters. In 1937, the Red Army numbered around 1.3 million, increasing to almost three times that number by June 1941. The rapid growth of the army necessitated in turn the rapid promotion of officers regardless of experience or training. Junior officers were appointed to fill the ranks of the senior leadership, many of whom lacked broad experience. This action in turn resulted in many openings at the lower level of the officer corps, which were filled by new graduates from the service academies. In 1937, the entire junior class of one academy was graduated a year early to fill vacancies in the Red Army. Hamstrung by inexperience and fear of reprisals, many of these new officers failed to impress the large numbers of incoming draftees to the ranks; complaints of insubordination rose to the top of offenses punished in 1941, and may have exacerbated instances of Red Army soldiers deserting their units during the initial phases of the German offensive of that year.


title: Red Army

text: By 1940, Stalin began to relent, restoring approximately one-third of previously dismissed officers to duty. However, the effect of the purges would soon manifest itself in the Winter War of 1940, where Red Army forces generally performed poorly against the much smaller Finnish Army, and later during the German invasion of 1941, in which the Germans were able to rout the Soviet defenders partially due to inexperience amongst the Soviet officers.


title: Red Army

text: In Lithuania, Red Army personnel robbed local shops. Following the fall of East Prussia, Soviet soldiers also carried out rapes in Germany, especially noted in Berlin until the beginning of May 1945. They were often committed by rear echelon units.


title: Red Army

text: The Soviet Union expanded its indigenous arms industry as part of Stalin's industrialisation program in the 1920s and 1930s.


title: Staten Island

text: Staten Island ( ) is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Richmond County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located in the city's southwest portion, the borough is separated from New Jersey by the Arthur Kill and the Kill Van Kull and from the rest of New York by New York Bay. With a population of 495,747 in the 2020 Census, Staten Island is the least populated borough but the third largest in land area at .


title: Staten Island

text: A home to the Lenape indigenous people, the island was settled by Dutch colonists in the 17th century. It was one of the 12 original counties of New York state. Staten Island was consolidated with New York City in 1898. It was formally known as the Borough of Richmond until 1975, when its name was changed to Borough of Staten Island. Staten Island has sometimes been called "the forgotten borough" by inhabitants who feel neglected by the city government.


title: Staten Island

text: The North Shore—especially the neighborhoods of St. George, Tompkinsville, Clifton, and Stapleton—is the island's most urban area. It contains the designated St. George Historic District and the St. Paul's Avenue-Stapleton Heights Historic District, which feature large Victorian houses. The East Shore is home to the F.D.R. Boardwalk, the world's fourth-longest boardwalk. The South Shore, site of the 17th-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlement, developed rapidly beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and is now mostly suburban. The West Shore is the island's least populated and most industrial part.


title: Staten Island

text: Motor traffic can reach the borough from Brooklyn by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and from New Jersey by the Outerbridge Crossing, Goethals Bridge and Bayonne Bridge. Staten Island has Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bus lines and an MTA rapid transit line, the Staten Island Railway, which runs from the ferry terminal at St. George to Tottenville. Staten Island is the only borough not connected to the New York City Subway system. The free Staten Island Ferry connects the borough to Manhattan across New York Harbor. It provides views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Lower Manhattan.


title: Staten Island

text: As in much of North America, human habitation appeared on the island fairly rapidly after the Wisconsin glaciation. Archaeologists have recovered tool evidence of Clovis culture activity dating from about 14,000 years ago. This evidence was first discovered in 1917 in the Charleston section of the island. Various Clovis artifacts have been discovered since then, on property owned by Mobil Oil.


title: Staten Island

text: The island was probably abandoned later, possibly because of the extirpation of large mammals on the island. Evidence of the first permanent Native American settlements and agriculture are thought to date from about 5,000 years ago, although early archaic habitation evidence has been found in multiple locations on the island.


title: Staten Island

text: Rossville points are distinct arrowheads that define a Native American cultural period from the Archaic period to the Early Woodland period, dating from about 1500 to 100 BC. They are named for the Rossville section of Staten Island, where they were first found near the old Rossville Post Office building.


title: Staten Island

text: At the time of European contact, the island was inhabited by the Raritan band of the Unami division of the Lenape. In Lenape, one of the Algonquian languages, Staten Island was called , meaning "as far as the place of the bad woods", or , meaning "the bad woods". The area was part of the Lenape homeland known as Lenapehoking. The Lenape were later called the "Delaware" by the English colonists because they inhabited both shores of what the English named the Delaware River.


title: Staten Island

text: The island was laced with Native American foot trails, one of which followed the south side of the ridge near the course of present-day Richmond Road and Amboy Road. The Lenape did not live in fixed encampments but moved seasonally, using slash and burn agriculture. Shellfish was a staple of their diet, including the Eastern oyster ("Crassostrea virginica") abundant in the waterways throughout the present-day New York City region. Evidence of their habitation can still be seen in shell middens along the shore in the Tottenville section, where oyster shells larger than 12 inches (305 mm) are sometimes found.


title: Staten Island

text: Burial Ridge, a Lenape burial ground on a bluff overlooking Raritan Bay in Tottenville, is the largest pre-European burial ground in New York City. Bodies have been reported unearthed at Burial Ridge from 1858 onward. After conducting independent research, which included unearthing bodies interred at the site, ethnologist and archaeologist George H. Pepper was contracted in 1895 to conduct paid archaeological research at Burial Ridge by the American Museum of Natural History. The burial ground today is unmarked and lies within Conference House Park.


title: Staten Island

text: The first recorded European contact on the island was in 1520 by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano who sailed through The Narrows on the ship "La Dauphine" and anchored for one night.


title: Staten Island

text: The Dutch did not establish a permanent settlement on for many decades. Its name derived from the Staten Generaal, the parliament of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. From 1639 to 1655, Cornelis Melyn and David de Vries made three separate attempts to establish one there, but each time the settlement was destroyed in conflicts between the Dutch and the local tribe. In 1661, the first permanent Dutch settlement was established at (Dutch for "Old Village") by a small group of Dutch, Walloon, and French Huguenot families, just south of the Narrows near South Beach. Many French Huguenots had gone to the Netherlands as refugees from the religious wars in France, suffering persecution for their Protestant faith, and some joined the emigration to New Netherland. At one point nearly a third of the residents of the Island spoke French. The last vestige of Oude Dorp is the name of the present-day neighborhood of Old Town adjacent to Old Town Road.


title: Staten Island

text: Staten Island was not spared the bloodshed that culminated in Kieft's War. In the summer of 1641 and in 1642, Native American tribes laid waste to Old Town.


title: Staten Island

text: At the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the Dutch ceded New Netherland to England in the Treaty of Breda, and the Dutch , anglicized as "Staten Island", became part of the new English colony of New York.


title: Staten Island

text: In 1670, the Native Americans ceded all claims to Staten Island to the English in a deed to Governor Francis Lovelace. In 1671, in order to encourage an expansion of the Dutch settlements, the English resurveyed (which became known as 'Old Town') and expanded the lots along the shore to the south. These lots were settled primarily by Dutch families and became known as (meaning 'New Village'), which later became anglicized as New Dorp.


title: Staten Island

text: Captain Christopher Billopp, after years of distinguished service in the Royal Navy, came to America in 1674 along with the newly appointed royal governor of New York and the Jerseys Sir Edmund Andros, in charge of a company of infantry. The following year, he settled on Staten Island, where he was granted a patent for of land. According to one version of an oft-repeated but apocryphal tale, Captain Billopp's seamanship secured Staten Island to New York, rather than to New Jersey: the island would belong to New York if the captain could circumnavigate it in one day, which he did. This story is most likely untrue, due to conflicting information on the time Christopher Billopp took to complete the race and whether he received a personal prize or not. Mayor Michael Bloomberg perpetuated the myth by referring to it at a news conference in Brooklyn on February 20, 2007. Reliable historical documentation of the event is extremely sparse, however, and most historians conclude that it is entirely apocryphal. In 2007, "The New York Times" addressed the issue in a news article, which concluded that this event was heavily embellished over the years and almost certainly originated in local folklore. YouTube personality CGP Grey addressed the story of the Staten Island race and its historical discrepancies in a 2019 video, in which he concluded that Gabriel Disosway, a local chronicler in Staten Island, was responsible for originating the legend in the mid-1800s.


title: Staten Island

text: In 1683, the colony of New York was divided into ten counties. As part of this process, Staten Island, as well as several minor neighboring islands, was designated as "Richmond County". The name derives from the title of Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond, an illegitimate son of King Charles II.


title: Staten Island

text: In 1687 and 1688, the English divided the island into four administrative divisions based on natural features: the manorial estate of colonial governor Thomas Dongan in the northeastern hills known as the "Lordship or Manor of Cassiltown", along with the North, South, and West divisions. These divisions later evolved into the four towns of Castleton, Northfield, Southfield, and Westfield. In 1698, the population was 727.


title: Staten Island

text: The government granted land patents in rectangular blocks of 80 acres (320,000 m), with the most desirable lands along the coastline and inland waterways. By 1708, the entire island had been divided up in this fashion, creating 166 small farms and two large manorial estates, the Dongan estate and a parcel on the southwestern tip of the island belonging to Christopher Billopp.


title: Staten Island

text: The first county seat was established in New Dorp in what was called Stony Brook at the time. In 1729, the county seat was moved to the village of Richmond Town, located at the headwaters of the Fresh Kills near the center of the island. By 1771, the island's population had grown to 2,847.


title: Staten Island

text: Staten Islanders were solidly supportive of the Crown, and the island played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War. General George Washington once called Islanders "our most inveterate enemies."


title: Staten Island

text: As support of independence spread throughout the colonies, residents of the island were so uninterested that no representatives were sent to the First Continental Congress, the only county in New York to not send anyone. This had economic repercussions in the months up through 1776, where New Jersey towns such as Elizabethport, Woodbridge, and Dover instituted boycotts on doing business with islanders.


title: Staten Island

text: On March 17, 1776, the British forces under Sir William Howe evacuated Boston and sailed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, Howe prepared to attack New York City, which then consisted entirely of the southern end of Manhattan Island. General George Washington led the entire Continental Army to New York City in anticipation of the British attack. Howe used the strategic location of Staten Island as a staging ground for the invasion.


title: Staten Island

text: Over 140 British ships arrived over the summer of 1776 and anchored off the shores of Staten Island at the entrance to New York Harbor. The British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries numbered about 30,000. Howe established his headquarters in New Dorp at the Rose and Crown Tavern, near the junction of present New Dorp Lane and Richmond Road. There the representatives of the British government reportedly received their first notification of the Declaration of Independence.


title: Staten Island

text: In August 1776, the British forces crossed the Narrows to Brooklyn and outflanked the American forces at the Battle of Long Island, resulting in the British control of the harbor and the capture of New York City shortly afterwards. Three weeks later, on September 11, 1776, Sir William's brother, Lord Howe, received a delegation of Americans consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Edward Rutledge, and John Adams at the Conference House on the southwestern tip of the island on the former estate of Christopher Billopp. The Americans refused a peace offer from Howe in exchange for withdrawing the Declaration of Independence, and the conference ended without an agreement.


title: Staten Island

text: On August 22, 1777, the Battle of Staten Island occurred between the British forces and several companies of the 2nd Canadian Regiment fighting alongside other American companies. The battle was inconclusive, though both sides surrendered over a hundred troops as prisoners. The Americans finally withdrew.


title: Staten Island

text: In early 1780, while the Kill Van Kull was frozen over, Lord Stirling led an unsuccessful Patriot raid from New Jersey on the western shore of Staten Island. It was repulsed in part by troops led by British Commander Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings.


title: Staten Island

text: In June 1780, Wilhelm von Knyphausen, commander of Britain's Hessian auxiliaries, led many raids and a full assault into New Jersey from Staten Island with the aim of defeating George Washington and the Continental Army. Although the raids were successful in the Newark and Elizabeth areas, the advance was halted at Connecticut Farms (Union) and the Battle of Springfield.


title: Staten Island

text: British forces remained on Staten Island for the remainder of the war. Most Patriots fled after the British occupation, and the sentiment of those who remained was predominantly Loyalist. Even so, the islanders found the demands of supporting the troops to be heavy. The British army kept headquarters in neighborhoods such as Bulls Head. Many buildings and churches were destroyed for their materials, and the military's demand for resources resulted in an extensive deforestation by the end of the war. The British army again used the island as a staging ground for its final evacuation of New York City on December 5, 1783. After their departure, many Loyalist landowners, such as Christopher Billop, the family of Canadian historian Peter Fisher, John Dunn, who founded St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and Abraham Jones, fled to Canada, and their estates were subdivided and sold.


title: Staten Island

text: On July 4, 1827, the end of slavery in New York state was celebrated at Swan Hotel, West Brighton. Rooms at the hotel were reserved months in advance as local abolitionists, including prominent free blacks, prepared for the festivities. Speeches, pageants, picnics, and fireworks marked the celebration, which lasted for two days.


title: Staten Island

text: In the early 19th century, New Jersey and New York disputed the location of their maritime boundary. The original charters were of no help because they were worded ambiguously. New York argued that the eastern edge of New Jersey was located at the Hudson River's shoreline during high tide, which would give New York control of all the docks and wharves on the Hudson River. New Jersey argued that the maritime boundary should be down the middle of the Hudson River and then continue out to the Atlantic Ocean, which would give New Jersey control of the docks and wharves as well as Staten Island. Vice President Martin Van Buren negotiated a compromise that established the maritime boundary in the middle of the Hudson River and gave Staten Island to New York. Ellis Island and Bedloe's Island, both uninhabited at the time, also became controlled by New Jersey.


title: Staten Island

text: From 1800 to 1858, Staten Island was the location of the largest quarantine facility in the United States. Angry residents burned down the hospital compound in 1858 in a series of attacks known as the Staten Island Quarantine War.


title: Staten Island

text: In 1860, parts of Castleton and Southfield were made into a new town, Middletown. The Village of New Brighton in the town of Castleton was incorporated in 1866, and in 1872 the Village of New Brighton annexed all the remainder of the Town of Castleton and became coterminous with the town.


title: Staten Island

text: The towns of Staten Island were dissolved in 1898 with the consolidation of the City of Greater New York, as Richmond County became one of the five boroughs of the expanded city. Although consolidated into the City of Greater New York in 1898, the county sheriff of Staten Island maintained control of the jail system, unlike the other boroughs, which had gradually transferred control of the jails to the Department of Correction. The jail system was not transferred until January 1, 1942. Staten Island is the only borough without a New York City Department of Correction major detention center.


title: Staten Island

text: The construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, along with the other three major Staten Island bridges, created a new way for commuters and tourists to travel from New Jersey to Brooklyn, Manhattan, and areas farther east on Long Island. The network of highways running between the bridges has effectively carved up many of Staten Island's old neighborhoods. The bridge opened many areas of the borough to residential and commercial development, especially in the central and southern parts of the borough, which had been largely undeveloped. Staten Island's population doubled from 221,991 in 1960 to 443,728 in 2000. Nevertheless, Staten Island remained less developed than the rest of the city. A "New York Times" article in 1972 stated that despite the borough having 333,000 residents, parts of the island still maintained a bucolic atmosphere with woods and marshes.


title: Staten Island

text: Throughout the 1980s, a movement to secede from the city steadily grew in popularity, notably championed by longtime New York state senator and former Republican Party mayoral nominee John J. Marchi. The campaign reached its peak during the mayoral term of David Dinkins (1990–1993), after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the New York City Board of Estimate, which had given equal representation to the five boroughs. Dinkins and the city government opposed a non-binding secession referendum, contending that the vote should not be permitted by the state unless the city issued a home rule message supporting it, which the city would not. Governor Mario Cuomo disagreed, and the vote went forward in 1993. Ultimately, 65% of Staten island residents voted to secede, through the approval of a new city charter making Staten Island an independent city, but implementation was blocked in the State Assembly.


title: Staten Island

text: In the 1980s, the United States Navy had a base on Staten Island called Naval Station New York. It had two sections: a Strategic Homeport in Stapleton and a larger section near Fort Wadsworth, where the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge enters the island. The base was closed in 1994 through the Base Realignment and Closure process because of its small size and the expense of basing personnel there.


title: Staten Island

text: Fresh Kills and its tributaries are part of the largest tidal wetland ecosystem in the region. Its creeks and wetlands have been designated a Significant Coastal Fish and Wildlife Habitat by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Opened along Fresh Kills as a "temporary landfill" in 1947, the Fresh Kills Landfill was a repository of trash for the city of New York. The landfill, once the world's largest man-made structure, was closed in 2001, but it was briefly reopened for the debris from Ground Zero following the September 11 attacks in 2001. It is being converted into a park. Plans for the park include a bird-nesting island, public roads, boardwalks, soccer and baseball fields, bridle paths, and a 5,000-seat stadium. Today, freshwater and tidal wetlands, fields, birch thickets, and a coastal oak maritime forest, as well as areas dominated by non-native plant species, are all within the boundaries of Fresh Kills.


title: Staten Island

text: During the Paleozoic Era, the tectonic plate containing the continent of Laurentia and the plate containing the continent of Gondwanaland were converging, the Iapetus Ocean that separated the two continents gradually closed, and the resulting collision between the plates formed the Appalachian Mountains. During the early stages of this mountain building known as the Taconic orogeny, a piece of ocean crust from the Iapetus Ocean broke off and became incorporated into the collision zone and now forms the oldest bedrock strata of Staten Island, the serpentinite.


title: Staten Island

text: This strata of the Lower Paleozoic (approximately 430 million years old) consists predominantly of the serpentine minerals, antigorite, chrysotile, and lizardite; it also contains asbestos and talc. At the end of the Paleozoic era (248 million years ago) all major continental masses were joined into the supercontinent of Pangaea.