Nowhere in the meticulous and distinguished work of Henry Charles Lea can one find any attempt to break the long history of the Spanish Inquisition into separate periods. Neither he nor lesser historians ever tried to identify distinct phases of greater or lesser inquisitorial activity, or show shifts in the priorities preoccupying the Holy Office. Both Lea and his critics argued passionately about the total number of people ever put on trial or executed by the Inquisitors; but everyone had to begin by manipulating or criticizing the same figures, originally proposed by the renegade inquisitorial official Juan Antonio Llorente in the early nineteenth century.