536 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
Jewish blood and members of the Church who i^ heart and secretjisage remajriftrl Jaws.
The papal Inquisition was never organized in Castile, and in Aragon it had a feeble existence. With the council of Tortosa, 1429, complaints began to be made that the conversos neglected to have their children baptized, and by attending the synagogues and observing the Jewish feasts were putting contempt upon their Christian faith. That such hypocrisy was practised cannot be doubted in view of the action of the Council of Basel which put its brand upon it. In 1451 Juan II. applied to the papal court to appoint a commission to investigate the situation. At the same time the popular feeling was intensified by the frantic appeals of clerics such as Friar Alfonso de Espina who in his Fortalicium Jidei — the Fortification of the Faith — brought together a number of alleged cases of children murdered by Jews and argued for the Church's right to baptize Jewish children in the absence of the parents' consent.^ The story ran that before Isabella's accession her confessor Torquemada, that hammer of heretics, secured from her a vow to leave no measure untried for the extirpation of heresy from her realm. Sometime later, listening to this same ecclesiastic's appeal, Ferdinand and Jijg_consort applied to th.e papal see for the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile.
Sixtus IV., who was then occupying the chair of St» E«ter, did not hesitate in a matter so important, and on Nov. J^, 1478, issued the bull . saiictiouing the fell Spanish tribunal. It authorized the Spanish sovereigns to appoint three bishops or other ecclesiastics to proceed against heretics and at the same time empowered them to remove and replace theseofficials as they thought fit. After a delay of two years, thej^pmniission was constitutedi_148p, and consisted of two Dominican Theologiaiis, Michael de Morillo and John of St. Martin, and a friar of St. Pablo, Seville. A public reception was given to the commission by the municipal council of Seville. The number of prisoners was soon too large for the capacity of St. Pablo, where the court first established itself, and it was removed to the chief stronghold of the city, the fortress of Triaua, whose
1 Lea, I. 15.
§ 60. THE SPANISH INQUISITION. 537
ample spaces and gloomy dungeons were well fitted for the dark work for which it had been chosen.
Once organized, the Inquisition began its work by issuing the so-called Edict of Grace ^ which gave heretics a period of 30 or 40 days in which to announce themselves and, on making confession, assured them of pardon. Humane as this measure was, it was also used as a device for detecting other spiritual criminals, those confessing, called penitentes, being placed under a vow to reveal the names of heretics. The humiliations to which the penitents were subjected had exhibition at the first auto defe held in Toledo, 1486, when 750 penitents of both sexes were obliged to march through the city carrying candles and bare-headed ; and, on entering the cathedral, were informed that one-fifth of their property had been confiscated, and that they were thenceforth incapacitated to hold public office. The first auto defe was held in Seville, Feb. 6, 1481, six months after the appointment of the tribunal, when six men and women were cremated alive. The ghastly spectacle was introduced with a sermon, preached by Friar Alfonso de Hojeda. A disastrous plague, wliich broke out in the city, did not interrupt the sittings of the tribunal, which established itself temporarily at Aracena, where the first holocaust included 23 men and women. According to a contemporary, by Nov. 4, 1491, 298 persons had been committed to the flames and 79 condemned to perpetual imprisonment. ^ The tribunal established at Ciudad Real, 1483, burnt 52 heretics within two years, when it was removed, in 1485, to Toledo. In Avila, from 1490-1500, 75 were burnt alive, and 26 dead bodies exhumed and cast into the flames. In cases, the entire conversos population was banished, as in Guadalupe, by the order of the inquisitor-general, Deza, in 1500. From Castile, the Inquisition extended its operations to Aragon, where its three chief centres were Valencia, Barcelona and Saragossa, and then to the Balearic Islands, where it was especially active. The first burning in Saragossa took place, 1484, when two men were burnt alive and one woman in effigy, and at Barcelona in 1488, when four persons were consumed alive.
1 Lea, II. 457-463. 2 Lea, I. 165.