Someone who investigates into crimes, taxation, and other matters. A detective. An officer of the Inquisition, who investigated people accused of blasphemous or heretical religious beliefs.
“Nevertheless, the town suffered severely in consequence: people would no longer shelter its merchants or give them credit, for fear that, accused of witchcraft, on the morrow, perhaps, they might lose all their possessions by confiscation. One of the inquisitors, who claimed to be able to discover the gulty at sight, and went so far as to declare that it was impossible for a man to be wrongly accused of sorcery, afterwards went mad. A poem full of hatred accused the persecutors of having got up the whole affair out of covetousness, and the bishop himself called the persecution ‘a thing intended by some evil persons.’”
J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).
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