Secreto e secretarios nei Tribunali dell’Inquisizione spagnola. Il caso di Sassari intorno al XVII secolo

The Spanish Inquisition implemented an important and widespread archival policy, and the Court notary (the secretario) was at the heart of this system. The secretaries followed the faith processes and all activities of the Holy Office, they drew up and kept the papers, compiled the registers, created research tools (called abecedarios); they kept the shelves in order, prevented access to outsiders and periodically sent copies of the court documents to the Suprema, in Madrid. The notaries of the Secreto also had to have good skills to compensate for any language barriers between inquisitors and defendants. For the Sardinian court, up to now these issues have been debated only marginally. This paper aims to offer an overview of the activity of the secretaries and the state of the archives of the Sassari Court of the Spanish Inquisition during the seventeenth century, by considering the general network and other peripheral realities. The research was carried out on the documents sent to the Suprema and kept in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid because, for reasons that are still unknown, nothing of the local archives has been preserved.