Torquemada

Torquemada is a historical novel by the American writer Howard Fast, published by Doubleday in 1966 and set during the Spanish Inquisition.

Prior Tomas de Torquemada and the Spanish knight Don Alvaro de Rafel have been friends for a long time. When King Ferdinand names Torquemada Spain's Grand Inquisitor, the friendship is the first thing his new authority puts at risk. He begins to hear whispers that Alvaro may have a secret Jewish past, and the man he has known for decades becomes, in the language of his office, a case to be examined. The novel follows the collapse of that relationship and the machinery of suspicion that does the work, with Torquemada transforming from his friend's ally into his most dangerous enemy.

Fast had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, jailed and blacklisted before he wrote the book, and its interest is as much in what an institution does to the people who operate it as in the historical events themselves. The novel is short, and it concentrates its drama into a friendship that is turned into evidence.