In Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum', what organization imprisons the narrator?

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the narrator is imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition.

The unnamed narrator is brought before judges of the Inquisition, but Poe never explains the specific offense for which he has been condemned. He faints after receiving a death sentence and awakens in a completely dark dungeon. His imprisonment sets up the story’s sequence of carefully staged terrors: the hidden pit, the descending pendulum, and the walls that heat up and move inward.

Poe published the tale in 1842 in the annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843. The story loosely evokes Spain during the Peninsular War, from 1808 to 1814, when French forces fought in Spain. Its historical setting is deliberately dramatic rather than exact; the torture devices Poe describes do not accurately represent documented Spanish Inquisition practice.

A common mix-up is calling the captors simply the Catholic Church or “the Tribunal.” The narrator specifically identifies the Inquisition’s judges, and the story ends when the French Army captures Toledo and the Inquisition falls into enemy hands. Poe’s focus is psychological: terror grows through darkness, sound, heat, and anticipation.