The Inquisition Brotherhood: Cofradía de San Pedro Martir of Colonial Mexico
As part of its religious, social and political mission, personnel of Mexico's Holy Office of the Inquisition were organized into a brotherhood, the Cofradia de San Pedro Martir, patron saint of the Inquisition. Although the Inquisition had functioned in New Spain from 1522, the brotherhood was not formally established until 1656. San Pedro Martir differed in many respects from other urban and rural confraternities in the viceroyalty. An outgrowth of Cruce-signati in the medieval inquisition, the Cofradia founded by Pope Innocent IV in 1252 after the murder of Inquisitor Peter Martir of Verona, came to Spain in the late fifteenth century. In the Iberian peninsula “Colegios de Familiares” formed and later developed into Cofradias whose membership was drawn from the Familiatura , a body of non-salaried Inquisition police known as Familiares.