"He was as cruel as the lord of hell..." This is how the 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about Torquemada. And it just so happened that the great inquisitor Thomas de Torquemada became one of the most odious figures in the history of mankind, "symbolizing the shame of the Inquisition," and the organization led by him was just a bogeyman, something a priori frightening and terrifying. How much truth is there in all this? Did this man accidentally become the confessor of Queen Isabella of Castile in one of the most fateful eras in the history of Spain, during the Reconquista and unification of the country? Historian, writer and translator Sergei Nechaev tried to answer these questions in his new book.