552 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
The last case of an execution by the Spanish Inquisition was a schoolmaster, Cayetano llipoU, July 26, 1826. His trial lasted nearly two years. He was accused of being a deist, and substituting in his school the words " Praise be to God " for "Ave Maria purissima." He died calmly on the gibbet after repeating the words, " I die reconciled to God and to nian."i
Not satisfied with putting heretical men out of the world, the Inquisition also directed its^attention to noxious writiiigs.^ At Seville, in 1490, Torquemada burnt a large number of Hebrew copies of the Bible, and a little later, at Salamanca, he burnt 6000 copies. Ten years later, 1502, Ferdinand and Isabella promulgated a law forbidding books being printed, imported and sold which did not have the license of a bishop or certain specified royal judges. All Lutheran writings were ordered by Adrian, in 1521, delivered up to the Inquisition^ Thenceforth the Spanish tribunal proved itself a vigorous guardian of the purity of the press. The first formal Index, compiled by the University of Louvain, 1546, was approved by the inquisitor-general Valdes and the suprema^ and ordered printed with a supplement. This was the first Index Expurgatorius printed in Spain. All copies of the Scriptures in Spanish were seized and burnt, and the ferocious law of 1558 ordered booksellers keeping or selling prohibited books punished with confiscation of goods or death. Strict inquisitorial supervision was had over all libraries in Spain down into the 19tli centuiy- ^^f the effect of this censorship upon Spanish culture. Dr. Lea says : "The intellectual development which in the 16th century promised to render Spanish literature and learning the most illustrious in Europe was stunted and starved into atrophy, the arts and sciences were neglected,
1 The Spanish Inquisition was introduced into Sicily in 1487, where it met with vigorous resistance from the parliament, and in Sardinia, 1492. In the New World its victims were Protestants, co/iwr.s'os, bigamists and fornicators. The Mexican tribunal was abolished in 1820, and that of Peru, the same year. As late as 1774 a Bogota physician was tried "as tlie first and only one who in this kingdom and perhaps in all America" had publicly declared himself for the Copernican system.
2 Lea, chapter on Censorship, III. 481-548 ; Ticknor : Span. Lit.., I. 4G1 sqq.
§ 60. THE SPANISH INQUISITION. 553
and the character which Spain acquired among the nations was tersely expressed in the current saying that Africa began at the Pyrenees."
The " ghastly total " of the victims consigned by the Spanish Inquisition to the flames or other punishments has been differently stated. Precise tables of statistics are of modern creation, but that it was large is beyond question. The historian, Llorente, gives the following figures : From 1480-1498, the date of Torquemada's death, 8800 were burnt alive, 6500 in effigy and 90,004 subjected to other punishments. From 1499- 1506, 1664 were burnt alive, 832 in efQgy and 32,456 subjected to other punishments. From 1507-1517, during the term of Cardinal Ximines, 2536 were burnt alive, 1368 in effigy and 47,263 subjected to other penalties. This writer gives the grandjtotnls \xp-±o-lB2iLas 14,344 burnt alive, 9372 in effigy and 195,937 condemned to other penalties or released as peuip tents. In 1524, an inscription was placed on the fortress of Triana, Seville, running : " In the year 1481, under the pontificate of Sixtus IV. and the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Inquisition was begun here. Up to 1524, 20,000 heretics and more abjured their awful crime on this spot and nearly 1000 were burnt." From records still extant, the victims in Toledo before 1501 are found to have numbered 297 burnt alive and 600 in effigy, and 5400 condemned to other punishment or reconciled. The documents, however, are not preserved or, at any rate, not known from which a full estimate could be made. In any case the numbers included thousands of victims burnt alive and tens of thousands subjected to other punishments. ^
The rise of the Spanish Inquisition was contemporary with Spain's advance tcTaTbremost'^pTace among the nations of Europe. After eight centuries, her territory was for the first time
1 See Hoensbroech, I. 139, quoting Llorente. Dr. Lea speaks of the apparent tendency of early writers to exaggerate the achievements of the "Holy OflSce," and calls in question, though with some hesitation, Llorente's figures and the figures given by an early secretary of the tribunal, Zurita, who records 4000 burnings and 30,000 reconciliations in Seville alone before 1520. See Lea's figures, IV. 51.3-624. Father Gams, in his Kirchengesch. Spaniens, reckons the number of those burnt, up to 1504, at 2000, but he excludes from these figures the burnings for other crimes than heresy. See Lea, IV. 517.