Cullen Murphy has an interesting essay in The Altantic about torture.  Contemporary interrogation and torture techniques derive from those used by the Inquistion.  He argues that rather than torture being a throwback to the middle ages, it was actually a new, modern method and was more a harbinger of things to come than a holdover from a previous time.  He writes that it is based on a philosophical shift -- that humanity could determine what happened and could find proof.  In the middle ages, he writes, it was assumed that human attempts at knowledge were limited and that in many or most instances we could not discover what happened or find proof, so we had to rely on God.  Though he doesn't say this himself, it raises the question -- did modernity begin with the Inquisition in the 12th century rather than the Italian renaissance in the 14th?