A columnist named Vox Day wrote an excellent piece in which he puts the Spanish Inquisition in perspective.   Day, and intelligent man who has obviously done his homework (I can’t say much for his haircut, though), starts out:

It is a curious thing considering how often it is brought up in
conversation and Internet debate by lay atheists, but in ‘The God
Delusion,’ Richard Dawkins conspicuously neglects to detail what he
describes as the ‘horrors’ of the Spanish
Inquisition. Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett both avoid
discussing it altogether. Only reason’s clown, Sam Harris, is
sufficiently foolish to swallow the old black legend, hook, line and
sinker, as he attempts to portray the collective inquisitions as one of
the two ‘darkest episodes in the history of faith.’

Later in the piece, Day provides some valuable information:

In light of its nightmarish reputation, it will surely surprise those
who believe that millions of people died in the Spanish Inquisition to
learn that throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, less than three
people per year were sentenced to death by the Inquisition throughout
the Spanish Empire, which ranged from Spain to Sicily and Peru. Secular
historians given access to the Vatican’s archives in 1998 discovered
that of the 44,674 individuals tried between 1540 and 1700, only 804
were recorded as being relictus culiae saeculari. The
763-page report indicates that only 1 percent of the 125,000 trials
recorded over the entire inquisition ultimately resulted in execution
by the secular authority, which means that throughout its infamous
345-year history, the dread Spanish Inquisition was less than
one-fourteenth as deadly on an annual basis as children’s bicycles.

This is the kind of material you’ll never find in the mainstream media.  Read the rest here.