Gaspar de Quiroga y Vela
General Inquisitor of Spain, 1573-1594
Gaspar de Quiroga y Vela (13 January 1512 – 20 November 1594) was a prominent Spanish churchman who rose to become General Inquisitor of Spain, from 1573 to 1594, and Archbishop of Toledo from 1577 to 1594. He was named a Cardinal by Pope Gregory XIII in 1578. He was the nephew of the 1st Bishop of Michoacán in Mexico, Vasco de Quiroga (died 1565).
Biography
Born in Madrigal de las Altas Torres, he studied at the Colegio de San Salvador de Oviedo of the University of Salamanca, of which he was later a professor, and the Colegio Mayor Santa Cruz in Valladolid. He obtained a licentiate in canon law in 1537 and a doctorate in canon law in 1538. He was named vicar general and a canon of Toledo.
He went to Rome in 1554 as an auditor of the Roman Rota. While in Rome he befriended Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. In 1559, he was sent by King Philip II as an envoy to Naples and to the Spanish-administered territories in the Italian peninsula.
He served as a member of the Spanish High Council of Justice since 1563 and as Bishop of Cuenca, (1561–77), being then promoted to Archbishop of Toledo, to replace Bartolomé de Carranza who had been under arrest in Spain and Rome for the last 17 years, charged with heresy.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gaspar de Quiroga y Vela” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.