Describe the means by which Spain attempted to defend and spread Catholicism at home and abroad?

Spain has been along history one of the main defenders of the Catholic doctrines and have tried to spread them all over the globe, in the colonies they had established during the Empire and also to defend it from disidence of heresy in their territories, at any cost.

Centuries before the Empire times, the Spanish had fought to recover their Peninsula territories which had been occupied in 711 by the Muslim. They were able to expell them from the last muslim province, Granada in 1942, the same year in which Columbus arrived to America.

When the Spanish people arrived in America, one of their main aims was to conduct the process known as Evangelization. They wanted to teach the native people there, the doctrines of Catholicism, so that all these pagans in the New World assimilated the religion of the colonizers.

Inside their territory, Spain did not admit heretic behaviours. This is how the group of institutions known as The Inquisition was founded in the 12th century, to combat heresy when it emerged among baptized Christians. They arrested suspects, tortured them until they confessed and prosecuted them in the Inquisition courts. Many times, when it was decided that someone was guilty, this person was burnt alive. The Inquisition lasted until the 19th century, when it was abolished after the Napoleonic Wars.