Pope Innocent III made an attempt to convert them; with this aim in view he sent two monks, Peter de Castelnau and one Rodolfe, to restore order amongst them and induce them to return to submission. But when they murdered one of his legates the Holy Father had recourse to those other less legitimate measures of combating liberty of conscience. He ordered the King of France, the nobles and clergy of the kingdom, to assume the crusader’s cross, and to proceed to the extirpation of the Albigensian heretics, whom he described as a worse danger to Christendom than the Saracens; and he armed them for the fray with the same spiritual weapons that John VIII had bestowed upon those who went to war in Palestine in the ninth century. Upon all who might die in the service of the Church he pronounced a plenary indulgence.

It is not the present aim to follow the history of the horrible strife that ensued—the massacres, pillages, burnings that took place in the course of the war between the Albigenses under Raymond of Toulouse and the Crusaders under Simon de Montfort. For over twenty years did that war drag on, and in the course of it the original grounds of the quarrel were forgotten; it passed into a struggle for supremacy between North and South, and thus, properly speaking, out of the history of the Inquisition.10

Now, for all that the title “Inquisitor of the Faith” was first bestowed by the Theodosian Code, and for all that persecutions against heretics and others had been afoot since an even earlier date than that of Theodosius, Innocent III is to be considered the founder of the Holy Inquisition as an integral part of the Church. For it is under his jurisdiction that the faculty of persecuting heretics, which hitherto had belonged entirely to the secular arm, is now conferred upon the clergy. He dispatched two Cistercian monks as inquisitors into France and Spain, to engage in the work of extirpating heretics; and he strictly enjoined all princes, nobles and prelates to afford every assistance to these emissaries, and to further them in every way in the work they were sent to do.11

Himself, personally, Pope Innocent directed his attention to the Paterini—a sect which rebelled against the celibacy imposed upon the clergy—who were gaining ground in Italy. He invoked the secular arm to assist him in their apprehension, imprisonment, and banishment, in seizing their possessions, which were confiscated, and in razing their houses to the ground.

In 1209 he assembled a council at Avignon, under the presidency of his legates, wherein by his directions it was ordained that every bishop should select such of his subjects, counts, castellans, and knights as might seem to him proper, and swear them to undertake the extermination of all excommunicated heretics.

“And to the end that the bishop may be the better enabled to purge his diocese of heretical pravity, let him swear one priest and two, three or more laymen of good repute in every parish to report to the bishop himself, and to the governors of cities or to the lords and bailiffs of places, the existence of any heretics or abettors of heresy wherever found, to the end that these may be punished according to the canonical and legal dispensations, in all cases suffering forfeiture of property. And should the said governors and others be negligent or reluctant in the execution of this divine service, let their persons be severally excommunicated, and their territories placed under the interdict of the Church.”12

In the year 1215 Pope Innocent held a further council at the Lateran in which he extended the field of ecclesiastical activity in persecution. He issued an injunction to all rulers, “as they desired to be esteemed faithful, to swear a public oath that they would labour zealously to exterminate from their dominions all those who were denounced as heretics by the Church.”13

This injunction was backed by a bull which menaced with excommunication and forfeiture of jurisdiction any prince who should fail to extirpate heretics from his dominions—so that at one stroke the Pope asserted his power to an extent that denied liberty of conscience to people and independence to princes.

And meanwhile every heretic against the Holy Catholic and Orthodox Faith, as accepted by the fathers assembled in the Church of St. John, was excommunicated, and there followed these provisions:

“When condemned, the secular powers, or their representatives, being present, they shall be delivered to these for punishment, the clerics being previously degraded from their orders. The property of laymen shall be confiscated; that of clerics bestowed upon their churches. Persons marked with suspicion only shall, unless they can clear themselves, be smitten with the sword of anathema, and shunned by all. If they persist for a year in excommunication, they shall be condemned as heretics.

“Secular powers must be moved or led, or at need compelled by ecclesiastical censure, to make public oath for the defence of the faith, as they themselves desire to be esteemed faithful, undertaking to labour with all their power to extirpate from their dominions those whom the Church shall denounce as heretics.”14

The excommunication that was to wait upon disobedience was no empty threat, nor yet was it concerned alone with the spiritual part of man. The Pope’s anathema imposed the same penalties upon those against whom it was launched as the Druid’s curse had imposed of old.15

Persons under the ban of the Church might hold no office, nor claim any of the ordinary rights of citizenship, or, indeed, of existence. In sickness or distress none might show them charity under pain of incurring the same curse, nor after death should their bodies be given Christian burial.

By these provisions and injunctions the Inquisition may be said to have entered upon the second stage of its evolution, and to have assumed a strictly ecclesiastical character—in short, to be canonically established.

It was Pope Innocent III who placed in the hands of the Church this terrible weapon of persecution, and who, by the awful severity of his own attitude towards liberty of conscience, of thought, and of expression, afforded to fanaticism and religious intolerance an example that was to be their merciless guide through centuries to come.

CHAPTER III
THE ORDER OF ST. DOMINIC

“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow Me!”

The contrast between the condition thus enjoined by the Founder of Christianity and the worldly position occupied by His Vicar on earth was now fast approaching the climax which was to become absolute with the era of the Renaissance.

From the simple folk foregathering in Rome in the middle of the first century to discuss and to guide one another in the practice of the new doctrine of love and humility, conveyed by word of mouth from the East, in all its pristine simplicity, unburdened as yet by theological complexities, unfettered by formularies, it is a far cry indeed to the proud curial Christians of the Rome of Pope Innocent III.

The successor of Peter, the poor fisherman of Galilee, was enthroned with a splendour outrivalling that of any other earthly potentate. Temporally he was lord of considerable dominions; spiritually he claimed empire over the entire Christian world, and maintained his supremacy with the thunderbolts of anathema which he had forged himself. His glittering court was thronged with rustling, scarlet prelates, with patricians in cloth of gold and silver, captains in steel, mincing fops and stately senators. He was arrayed in garments woven of the very finest fleece, crowned with the triple diadem of white peacock feathers within three flaming circlets of precious stones. On his coronation kings served him upon the knee at table; throughout his reign princes and patricians were his lackeys.

From the steps of the Lateran on the day of his accession he would fling a handful of money to the Roman crowd, exclaiming: “Gold and silver are not for me. What I have I give to thee.”

Yet his riches were vast, their sources almost inexhaustible. The luxury in which he lived and moved was the most sumptuous that wealth could command and art and artifice produce.

Nor was this ecclesiastical magnificence confined to Rome and the Papal Court. Gradually it had come to permeate the entire body clerical until it had affected even the monastic orders. From the simplicity of their beginnings these orders had developed into baronial institutions. The fathers presided in noble abbeys over wide tracts of arable and vineyard which they owned and cultivated, and over rural districts and parishes, which they governed and taxed as feudal lords rather than served as priests.

So arrogant and aristocratic was become the spirit of a clergy whose mission was to preach the sublimest and most ideal of democratic doctrines, that the Church seemed no longer within the reach of plebeian and peasant-folk. It was fast becoming an institution of patricians for patricians.

How long this state of things might have endured, what results might have attended its endurance, it were perhaps idle to speculate. That a change was wrought, that provision was made for the lowly and the poor, is due to the advent of two men as similar in much as in much else they were dissimilar. They met in Rome at the foot of the pontifical throne.

Either might have been the founder of a religion had he not found already in the world an ideal religion which he could serve. Both were men born into easy circumstances of life; one, Francesco Bernardone, was the son of a wealthy merchant of Assisi; the other, Domingo de Guzman, of Calahorra, was a nobleman of Spain.

To-day the Church includes them in her Calendar as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic. They are the resplendent twain whom Dante beheld together in his “Paradise”:

St. Francis—through the sweetness and tenderness that emanated from his poetic, mystic nature, the most lovable of all the saints—came from his native Assisi to implore the Father of Fathers to permit him to band together into an order the barefoot companions he had already gained, to the end that they should practise Christ’s injunction of poverty and self-abnegation, and minister to the afflicted.

St. Dominic—and our concern is more with him—had been chosen for his eloquence and learning to accompany the Bishop of Osma upon an inquisitorial journey into Southern France. There he had witnessed the fierce carnage that was toward. He had preached to the heretics at Toulouse, and the burning, passionate eloquence of his oratory had made converts of many of those who were prepared to resist the cruel arguments of fire and steel.

In the ardour of his zeal he had flung aside his rank and the ease and dignity it afforded him. Like St. Francis he went barefoot, embracing poverty and self-denial; yet, less mystical, less tender, entirely practical where the propagation of the Faith was concerned, he had exulted in the bloody victories that Simon de Montfort had won over the heretical Albigenses.

Yet, if he gloried in the end achieved—conceiving it the supremest of all human ends—he must have been touched with regret for the means employed.

He has been termed a fierce and cruel zealot. But ferocity and cruelty do not go hand in hand with such lowly humility as undoubtedly was his. And the very object of his mission to Rome permits, if it does not point to, a very different conclusion. He went deploring the bloodshed he had witnessed, however greatly he may have prized the fruits of it. Inspired by the success that had attended his oratory, he aimed at providing other and gentler means by which in the first instance to seek the attainment of the same ends. He went to implore Pope Innocent’s leave to found an order of preachers who in poverty and lowliness should go abroad to win back to the Roman fold the sheep that had strayed into heretical pastures.

Pope Innocent considered the simultaneous requests of both these men—requests which, springing from the same passionate fervour in both, yet came by different, if similar, channels to a sort of unity in the end.

He perceived the services which such men as these might render to the Church, endowed as they were with the magnetic power of creating followings, of inflaming hearts, and replenishing the flickering lamp of public zeal.

He detected no heresy, no irony, in the cult of pauperdom which they would go forth to preach under the sanction and charter of the luxurious, aristocratic, curial court.

But there existed another obstacle to his granting them their prayers. So numerous already were the monastic orders that a Council of the Lateran had decreed that no more should be created. Favouring these petitioners, however, he was applying himself to the surmounting of the difficulty when death took him.

Thus the burden of solving this problem was thrust upon his successor, Honorius III. And it is said that the new pope was spurred to discover a solution by a dream—which has been made the subject of a fresco by Bennozzo Gozzoli—in which he beheld this saintly pair supporting with their hands the tottering Lateran.

Since he could not establish them and their followers as monastic fathers, he had recourse to creating brotherhoods for them. These brotherhoods, he affiliated to the order of St. Augustine, the Dominicans as friars-preachers (fratres predicatores) and the Franciscans as friars-minors (fratres minores).

Thus were launched these two mendicant orders, which by the enormous following they were so soon to win, were destined to become one of the greatest means of power of the Roman Church.

In the lifetime of their founders the fundamental laws of poverty were observed in all their intended purity. But soon thereafter, being men under their rough habits, and susceptible to the ambition that is man’s, upon the acquisition of power followed the acquisition of wealth. Their founders had accomplished a renascence of the original spirit of Christianity. But soon this began to undergo modification, and to respond to worldly influences, until the history of the friars-mendicant repeats and mirrors the history of Christianity itself. In a measure as they spread through Christendom, so they acquired convents, lands, and property as they went. The personal poverty of each brother remained, it is true; they still went abroad barefoot and coarsely garbed, “without staff, or bag, or bread, or money,” as their rule decreed. Individually they kept the vow of privation; but considered collectively their poverty “remained outside the convent gate,” as Gregorovius says, echoing what Dante had said before him.17

For the service of the Church the friars-mendicant became a splendid army, and an army, moreover, whose maintenance made no draught upon the pontifical treasury, since, by virtue of their mendicancy, the orders were entirely self-supporting. And whilst both orders, magnificently organized, grew extremely powerful, the Dominicans became formidable through their control of that Inquisition whose early stirrings had inspired St. Dominic to his task.

His aim had been to found a preaching order whose special mission should be the overthrow of heresy wherever found. The brethren were to combat it, employing their eloquence on the one hand to induce the heretic to abjure his error, on the other to inflame the faithful against him, so that terror should accomplish what might not be possible to persuasion.

It may be that this mission which they had made specially their own, as their founder ordained, peculiarly fitted the Dominicans to assume the government of an ecclesiastical establishment whose aim was identical. It was this order of St. Dominic that was to erect the grim edifice of the Holy Office, and to develop and assume entire control of the terrible machinery of the Inquisition. Their persuasion was to be the ghastly persuasion of the rack; their eloquence was to be the burning eloquence of the tongues of material flame that should lick their agonizing victims out of existence. And all for the love of Christ!

Although it might be difficult to show—as has been attempted—that Domingo de Guzman himself was actually the first ordained Inquisitor, nevertheless as early as 1224, within three years of his death, the Inquisition in Italy and elsewhere was already entirely in the hands of the Dominicans. This is shown by a constitution promulgated at Padua in February of that year by the Emperor Frederic II. It contains the following announcement:

“Be it known to all that we have received under our special protection the preaching friars of the order of preachers, sent into our Empire on business of the Faith against heretics, and likewise all who may lend them assistance—as much in going as in abiding and returning—save such as are already prescribed; and it is our wish that all should give them favour and assistance; wherefore we order our subjects to receive benignly any of the said friars whenever and wherever they may arrive, keeping them secure from the enmity of heretics, assisting them in every way to accomplish their ministry regarding the business of the Faith.... And we do not doubt that you will render homage to God and our Empire by collaborating with the said friars to deliver our Empire from the new and unusual infamy of heretical pravity.”18

The constitution decreed that heretics when so condemned by the Church and delivered over to the secular arm should be condignly punished; that if any, through the fear of death, should desire to return to the faith, he should receive the penance that might be imposed canonically and be imprisoned for life; that if in any part of the Empire heretics should be discovered by the inquisitors or by other zealous Catholics, the civil powers should be under the obligation of effecting their arrest at the request of the said inquisitors or other Catholics, and of holding them in safe custody until excommunicated by the Church, when they should be burnt; that the same punishment should be suffered by fautores—i.e. those guilty of concealing or defending heretics; that fugitives be sought for, and that converts from the same heresy be employed to discover them.

Odious as was this last enactment, there was yet worse contained in the Emperor’s constitution. It was decreed that “the sin of lèse-Majesté divine being, as it is, greater than that of lèse-Majesté humaine, and God being the avenger of the sins of the fathers on the children, to the end that these may not imitate the sins of those, the descendants of heretics to the second generation shall be deemed incapable of honours or of holding any public office—excepting the innocent children who shall denounce the iniquity of their fathers.”19

The barbarous provision here given in italics calls for no comment.

Within four years of issuing that harsh proclamation against all rebels from the sway of Rome, Frederic himself, in rebellion against the pontiff’s temporal sway, was to feel the lash of excommunication. But with that we have no concern. After his reconciliation with the Pope he renewed the constitution of 1224, adding a provision concerning blasphemers, who, in common with heretics of whatever sect, should suffer death by fire; yet if the bishops should desire to save any such, this could only be done subject to the offender’s being deprived of his tongue, so that never again should he blaspheme God.

In the year 1227 Ugolino Conti, who had been a friend of Dominic and of Francis, ascended the papal throne under the style of Gregory IX.

It was this pontiff who, carrying forward the work that had been undertaken in that direction by Innocent III, gave the Inquisition a stable form. He definitely placed the control of it in the hands of the Dominican friars, giving them, where necessary, the assistance of the Franciscans. But the participation of the latter in the business of that terrible tribunal is so slight as to be insignificant.

Gregory’s bull, given in “Raynaldus,”20 is one of excommunication against all heretics.

Further, it ordains that all condemned by the Church shall be delivered to the secular arm for punishment, all clerics so delivered being first degraded from their orders; that should any wish to abjure his heresy and return to the Church, penance shall be imposed upon him, and he shall suffer perpetual imprisonment. Abettors, concealers, and defenders of heretics are similarly excommunicated; and if any such shall neglect to procure absolution within one year, he shall be accounted infamous, and shall be neither eligible for any public office nor the elector of any other, nor act as witness, testator, inheritor, nor have power to seek justice when wronged. If a judge, no proceedings shall be laid before him, and his sentences, where passed, shall be null and void; if an advocate, he shall not have faculty to plead; if a notary, his deeds shall be void; if a cleric, he shall be deposed from his office and benefices.

Similarly, the ban of excommunication shall fall upon those who hold traffic with any who are excommunicated, and they shall further be punished with other penalties.

Those who are under suspicion of heresy, unless they see to it that they overcome the suspicion either by canonical purgation or otherwise according to the quality of the person and the motives for the suspicion, shall be excommunicated, and if they do not give condign satisfaction within one year, they shall be deemed heretics. Their claims or appeals shall not then be admitted, nor shall judges, advocates, or notaries exercise their functions in favour of them; priests shall refuse to administer the sacraments to them and to admit their alms or oblations, and so shall the Templars and Hospitallers and other regular orders, under pain of loss of office, from which naught can save them but a mandate from the Holy See.

Should any give Christian burial to one who has died under excommunication, he shall himself incur excommunication, from which he shall not be delivered until with his own hands he shall have exhumed the corpse, and so disposed that the place may never again be used for sepulture.

Should any know of the existence of heretics or of any who practise secret conventicles or whose ways of living are uncommon, they are bound under pain of excommunication to divulge the same to their confessor or other by whom they believe it will come to the knowledge of their prelate.

Children of heretics and of the abettors or concealers of heretics shall be deprived until the second generation of holding any public office or benefice.

To the provisions of this bull, additions were made by the civil governor of Rome, as representing the secular arm whose concern it would be to inflict the punishments regarding which the Church refrained from being explicit—confining herself to the promise that they should be “condign.”

He provided that: those arrested should be detained in prison until condemned by the Church, when, after eight days, they should be punished.

Their property should be confiscated, one-third going to the delator, one-third to the judge who should pronounce sentence, and one-third to repair the walls of Rome, or otherwise as might be considered.

The dwellings of heretics or of any who should consciously have entertained heretics should be razed to the ground.

If any man should have knowledge of the existence of heretics and fail to denounce them he should be fined the sum of 20 livres. Should he lack the means to pay, he was to be banished until he could find them.

Abettors and concealers of heretics should for the first offence suffer confiscation of one-third of their property, to be applied to keeping the walls of Rome in repair. If the offence were repeated, then they should be banished for ever.

All who were elected senators must swear before taking office that they would observe all laws against heretics; and were any to refuse this oath his acts as senator would be null and void and none should be obliged to follow or obey him, whilst those who might have sworn obedience to him were absolved of their oath. Should a senator accept this oath but afterwards refuse or neglect to respect its terms, he must incur the penalties of perjury, suffer a fine of 200 silver marks, to be applied to the repairing of the walls, and become ineligible for any public office.

Two years later—in 1233—at a Council held at Béziers, the papal legate, Gaultier of Tournai, elaborated these canons by the following provisions:

“All magistrates, nobles, vassals, and others shall diligently seek to discover, apprehend, and punish heretics wherever found. Every parish in which a heretic is discovered shall pay as a penalty for having harboured him one silver mark to the person who shall have discovered him. All houses in which heretics may have preached shall be demolished and the property confiscated, and fire shall be set to all caves and other hiding-places where heretics are alleged to be concealed. All the property of heretics shall be confiscated, and their children shall inherit nothing. Their abettors, concealers, or defenders shall be dealt with in the same manner. Any persons suspected of heresy must make public profession of faith upon oath, under pain of suffering as heretics; they shall be compelled to attend divine service on every feast-day, and all who are reconciled to the Church shall wear as a distinguishing badge two crosses externally on their garments—one on the breast, the other on the back—both of yellow cloth, three fingers in width, the vertical limb measuring 2½ hands, the horizontal one 2 hands.21 If a hood is worn, this must bear a third cross—all under pain of being deemed heretics and suffering confiscation of property.”22

These enactments by their uncompromising harshness abundantly reveal the extent to which heretics were execrated by the Church in her intolerance and her firm determination to extirpate them. They also reveal something of the far-reaching, pitiless, priestly subtlety and craft which were to render so terrible this tribunal.

The provisions for the punishment of those who should be moved by Christian charity to succour any of the persecuted were devised to the end that terror should stifle all such compassion; whilst the decree that the children of convicted heretics should suffer disinheritance and become ineligible for any honourable appointment was calculatedly introduced to forge a further weapon out of parental love. Where a man might readily, himself, have endured martyrdom for his convictions, he would be made to pause before including his children in the same sacrifice, before suffering them to go destitute and branded.

In the eyes of the Church the end in view could not fail to justify any means that might be employed. The extirpation of heresy was a consummation so very fervently to be desired that any steps—almost any sin—would be condonable if conducive to that end.

It has been argued that this crusade against heresy was political, a campaign waged by the Church to protect herself from the onslaught of liberty of thought, which was threatening her overthrow. Such no doubt had been the case in earlier centuries; but it was so no longer. Roman Catholicism had grown and spread like a mighty tree, until her shadow lay across the face of Europe and her roots were thrust far and wide into the soil. These had taken too firm a hold, they were too full of vigour, to permit that the withering of an occasional branch should give her concern for the vitality of the growth itself. She had no such concern. However abominable, however feral, however unchristian even, may have been the institution of the Holy Office, it is difficult to think that the spirit in which it was founded was other than pure and disinterested.

It may seem bitterly ironical that men should have been found who in the name of the meek and compassionate Christ relentlessly racked and burnt their fellow-creatures. It was—bitterly, deplorably, tragically ironical. But they were not conscious of the irony. In what they did they were sincere—as sincere as St. Augustine when he urged the extermination of heretics; and none can call in question his sincerity or the purity of his motives.

To understand their attitude it is but necessary to consider the absolute belief that was the Catholics’ in what Lecky calls “the doctrine of exclusive salvation.” Starting from the premise that the Church of Rome is the true and only Church of Christ, they held that no salvation was possible for any man who was not a member of it. Nor could ignorance—however absolute—of the true faith be urged as an excuse for error, any more than may ignorance of the law be pleaded in the worldly courts to-day. Thus, not only did they account irrevocably damned those who schismatically deserted from the Church, and those who like Jew and Moslem remained deliberately outside its walls, but similarly—such was man’s indifferently flattering conception of divine justice and divine intelligence—the savages who had never so much as heard the name of Christ, and the very babe who died before his heritage of Original Sin could be washed away by the baptismal waters. Indeed, fathers of the Church had waged heated wars of controversy concerning the precise moment at which pre-natal life sets in, and, consequently, damnation is incurred by the soul of the fœtus should it perish in the womb.

When it is considered that such doctrines were held dogmatically, it will be realized that in the sight of the Church—whose business was the salvation of souls—there could be no sin so intolerable, so execrable, as heresy. It will be realized how it happened that the Church could consider those of her children who were guilty of such crimes as murder, rape, adultery, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain, with the tolerance of an indulgent parent, whilst rising up in intolerant wrath to smite the heretic whose life might be a model of pure conduct. The former were guilty of only the sins of weak humanity; and sinners who have the faith may seek forgiveness, and find it in contrition. But heresy was not merely the worst of sins, as some have held. In the eyes of the Church it transcended the realm of sin—it was infinitely worse than sin, because it represented a state that was entirely hopeless, a state not to be redeemed or mitigated by good actions or purity of life.

Taking this view of heresy, the Church accounted it her duty to stamp out this awful soul-pestilence so as to prevent its spreading; and she had St. Augustine’s word for it that it was merciful to be merciless in the attainment of that object. When viewed, as it were, from within, there is nothing illogical in the attitude of the Church towards heresy. What is illogical is the conception of God that is involved in the doctrine of exclusive salvation.

Even if we survey the case of Galileo—one of the most illustrious prisoners ever arraigned before the tribunal of the Holy Office—we have no just cause to suppose that, in demanding his retraction of the theory of the earth’s movement round the sun, the inquisitors were inspired by any motives beyond the fear lest the spread of a notion—honestly deemed by them to be an illusion—should disturb man’s faith in the Biblical teaching with which it was in conflict.

CHAPTER IV
ISABELLA THE CATHOLIC

Llorente agrees with the earlier writers on the subject in considering the Spanish Inquisition as an institution distinct from that which had been established to deal with the Albigenses and their coevals in heresy. It is distinct only in that it represents a further development of the organization launched by Innocent III and perfected by Gregory IX.

Before entering upon the consideration of this Modern Inquisition—as it is called—it will perhaps be well to take a survey of the Spain of the Catholic Sovereigns—Ferdinand and Isabella—in whose reign that tribunal was set up in Castile.

For seven hundred years, with varying fortune and in varying degree, the Saracen had lorded it in the Peninsula.

First had come Berber Tarik, in 711, to overthrow the Visigothic Kingdom of Roderic, to spread the Moslem dominion as far as the mountains in the north and east and west from sea to sea. When the Berber tribe, the Syrians, and the Arabs had fallen to wrangling among themselves, Abdurrahman the Omayyad crossed from Africa to found the independent amirate, which in the tenth century became the Caliphate of Cordova.

Meanwhile the Christians had been consolidating their forces in the mountain fastnesses of the north to which they had been driven, and under Alfonso I they founded the Kingdom of Galicia. Thence, gradually but irresistibly, presenting a bold front to the Moorish conqueror, they forced their way down into the plains of Leon and Castile, so that by the following century they had driven the Saracens south of the Tagus. Following up their advantage, they continued to press them, intent upon driving them into the sea, and they might have succeeded but for the coming of Yusuf ben Techufin, who checked the Christian conquest, hurled them back across the Tagus, and, master of the country to the south of it, founded there the Empire of the Almoravides.

After these came the Almohades—the followers of the Mahdi—and the land rang for half a century with the clash of battle between Cross and Crescent, Castile, Leon, Aragon, and the new-born Kingdom of Portugal striving side by side to crush the common foe at Navas de Tolosa.

In 1236 Leon and Castile—now united into one kingdom—in alliance with Aragon, wrested Cordova from the Moors; in 1248 Seville was conquered, and in 1265 Diego of Aragon drove the Saracen from Murcia, and thereby reduced the Moslem occupation to Granada and a line of Mediterranean seaboard about Cadiz, in which they remained until Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, by virtue of their marriage, had united the two crowns on the death (in 1474) of Henry IV, Isabella’s brother.

Ferdinand brought, with Aragon, Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples; Isabella brought, with Castile, Leon and the rest of the Spanish territory, saving Granada and that portion of the coast still in Moorish hands. And thus was founded, by the welding of these several principalities into one single state, that mighty Kingdom of Spain which Columbus was so soon to enrich by a new world.

But though founded by this marriage, this kingdom still required consolidating and subjecting. Generations of misrule in Castile, culminating in the lax reigns of John II and Henry IV, had permitted the spread of a lawlessness so utter that its like was not to be found in any other state at that time. Anarchy was paramount mistress of the land, and Pulgar has left us a striking picture of the impossible conditions that prevailed.

“In those days,” he writes, “justice suffered, and was not to be done upon the malefactors who plundered and tyrannized in townships and on the highways. None paid debts who did not want to do so; none was restrained from committing any crime, and none dreamed of obedience or subjection to a superior. What with present and past wars, people were so accustomed to turbulence that he who did not do violence to others was held to be a man of no account.

Citizens, peasants, and men of peace were not masters of their own property, nor could they have recourse to any for redress of the wrongs they suffered at the hands of governors of fortresses and other thieves and robbers. Every man would gladly have engaged to give the half of his property if at that price he might have purchased security and peace for himself and his family. Often there was talk in towns and villages of forming brotherhoods to remedy all these evils. But a leader was wanting who should have at heart the justice and tranquillity of the Kingdom.”23

The nobility, as may be conceived—and, indeed, as Pulgar clearly indicates—were not only tainted with the general lawlessness, but were themselves the chief offenders, each man a law unto himself, a tyrannical, extortionate ruler of his vassals, lord of life and death, unscrupulously abusing his power, little better than a highway robber, caring nothing for the monarchy so long as the monarchy left him undisturbed, ready to rebel against it should it attempt to curtail his brigandage.

To crush these and other unruly elements in the state, to resolve into order the chaos that had invaded every quarter of the kingdom, was the task which at the outset the young Queen perceived awaiting her—a task that must have daunted any mind less virile, any spirit less vigorous.

And there were other and more pressing matters demanding her instant attention if she were to retain her seat upon this almost bankrupt throne of Castile which she had inherited from her brother.

Alfonso V of Portugal was in arms, invading her frontiers to dispute, on his niece Juana’s behalf, Isabella’s right.

Henry IV had left no legitimate issue, but his wife Juana of Portugal had brought forth in wedlock a daughter of whom she pretended that he was the father, whilst the King of Portugal, to serve interests of his own, recognized the girl as his legitimate niece. Public opinion, however, hesitated so little to proclaim her bastardy that it had named her La Beltraneja, after Beltran de la Cueva who notoriously had been her mother’s lover. And what Beltran de la Cueva, himself, thought about it, may be inferred from the circumstance that in the ensuing struggle he was found fighting for the honour of Castile under the banner of Queen Isabella.

The war demanded all the attention and resources of the Catholic Monarchs, and Isabella’s own share in these labours was conspicuous. They resulted in the rout of the Portuguese supporters of the pretender at Toro in 1476. By that victory Isabella was securely seated upon her throne and became joint ruler with Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon.

She was twenty-five years of age at the time, a fair, shapely woman of middle height, with a clear complexion, eyes between green and blue, and a gracious, winsome countenance remarkable for its habitual serenity. Such, indeed, was her self-control, Pulgar tells us, that not only did she carefully conceal her anger when it was aroused, but even in childbirth she could “dissemble her feelings, betraying no sign or expression of the pain to which all women are subject.” He adds that she was very ceremonious in dress and equipage, that she was deliberate of gesture, quick-witted, and ready of tongue, and that in the midst of the labour of government—and very arduous labour, as shall be seen—she found time to learn Latin, so that she could understand all that was said in that tongue.

“She was a zealous Catholic and very charitable, yet in her judgments she inclined rather to rigour than to mercy. She listened to counsel, but acted chiefly upon her own opinions. Of a rare fidelity to her word, she never failed to fulfil that to which she had pledged herself, save where compelled by stress of circumstance. She was reproached, together with her husband, of being wanting in generosity, because, seeing the royal patrimony diminished by the alienation of fiefs and castles, she was always very careful of such concessions.

“‘Kings,’ she was wont to say, ‘should preserve with care their dominions, because in alienating them they lose at once the money necessary to make themselves beloved and the power to make themselves feared.’”24

Such is the portrait that Pulgar has left us, and considering that he is writing of a sovereign, it would be no more than reasonable to suspect flattery and that curious, undiscriminating enthusiasm which never fails to create panegyrists when it is a question of depicting a prince, however inept, to his contemporaries. But if Pulgar has erred in this instance, it has been on the side of moderation in his portrayal of this gifted, high-spirited woman.

Her actions speak more eloquently of her character than can the pen of any chronicler, and it is in the deeds of princes that we must seek their true natures, not in what may have been written of them in their own day. The deeds of Isabella’s life—with one dark exception that is the subject of this history—more than bear out all that Pulgar and others have set down in praise of her.

No sooner had she overthrown those who came from abroad to dispute her right to the crown than she turned her attention to the subjugation of those who disputed her authority at home. In this herculean labour she had the assistance of Alonzo de Quintanilla, her chancellor, and Juan Ortega, the King’s sacristan. These men proposed to organize at their own risk one of those brotherhoods which Pulgar mentions as having been so ardently desired by the country for its protection from those who preyed upon it. This hermandad was to act under royal sanction and guidance, with the object of procuring peace and protection of property in the kingdom. Isabella readily approved the proposal, and the brotherhood was immediately founded, a tax to support it being levied upon those in whose interest it was established, and very willingly paid by them.

Splendidly organized, this association, half military, half civil, so effectively discharged the functions for which it was created, that twenty years later—in 1498—it was possible to abolish it, and to replace it by a much simpler and less costly system of police which then sufficed to preserve the order that had been restored.

Further to subject the turbulent and insubordinate nobility, Isabella employed methods similar to those adopted in like case by her neighbour, Louis XI of France. She bestowed the offices of state upon men of merit without regard to birth, which hitherto had been accounted the only qualification. The career of the law was thrown open to the burgher classes, and every office under the crown was made accessible to lawyers, who thus became the staunch friends of the sovereign.

If the nobles did not dare to revolt, at least they protested in the strongest terms against these two innovations that so materially affected and weakened their prestige. They represented in particular that the institution of the hermandad was the manifestation of a want of confidence in the “faithful nobility,” and they implored that four members of their order should be appointed by the Catholic Sovereigns to form a council of supreme direction of the affairs of State, as under the late King Henry IV.

To this the Catholic Sovereigns replied that the hermandad was a tutelary institution which was very welcome to the country, and which it was their pleasure to maintain. As for the offices of State, it was for the sovereigns to appoint such men as they considered best qualified to hold them. The nobles, they added, were free to remain at Court or to withdraw to their own domains, as they might see fit; but as for the sovereigns, themselves, as long as it should please God to preserve them in the high position in which He had deigned to place them, it should be their care not to imitate the monarch who was cited to them as an example, and not to become puppets in the hands of their “faithful nobility.”

That answer gave the nobles pause. It led them to perceive that a change had taken place, and that the lawless days of Henry IV were at an end. To have made them realize this was something. But there was more to be done before they would understand that they must submit to the altered conditions, and Isabella pursued the policy she had adopted with an unswerving directness, as the following story from Pulgar’s Chronicle bears witness:

A quarrel had broken out in the Queen’s palace at Valladolid between Don Fadrique Enriquez (son of the Admiral of Castile) and Don Ramiro de Guzman. Knowledge of it reached the Queen, and she ordered both disputants to hold themselves under arrest in their own quarters until she should provide that judgment be given between them by the Courts. Fadrique, however, signified his contempt of the royal mandate by disobeying it and continuing at large. Learning this, Isabella gave the more obedient Guzman his liberty, and the assurance of her word that he should suffer no harm.

A few days later he was riding peacefully through the street, secure in the Queen’s safe-conduct, when he was set upon by three masked horsemen of the household of Fadrique and severely beaten. No sooner did the Queen hear of this further affront to her authority than she got to horse, and rode through torrential rain from Valladolid to the Admiral’s castle at Simancas. In fact, in such haste did she set out that she rode alone, without waiting for an escort. This, however, followed presently, but did not come up with her save under the very walls of the Admiral’s fortress.

She summoned the Admiral, and commanded him to deliver up his rebellious son to her justice, and when Don Alonso Enriquez protested that his son was not there, she bade her followers search the castle from battlements to dungeons. The search, however, proved fruitless, and Isabella returned empty-handed and indignant to Valladolid. Arrived there, she took to her bed, and to those who came to seek news of her health, she replied: “My body aches with the blows delivered yesterday against my safe-conduct by Don Fadrique.”

The Admiral, trembling before the royal wrath, resolved to deliver up his son and cast him upon the mercy of the Queen. So the Constable of Castile—Fadrique’s uncle—undertook the office of intercessor. He went with Don Fadrique to Valladolid, and imploring Isabella to consider that the young man was but in his twentieth year and that he had sinned through the rashness of youth, begged her to do upon him the justice she might wish or the mercy that was due.

The Queen, however, was not to be moved to mercy for offences that set her royal authority in contempt. She was inexorable. She refused to see the offender, and submitted him to the indignity of being taken to prison through the streets of the city by an alcalde. After a spell of confinement there she banished him to Sicily, prohibiting his return to Spain under pain of severest punishment.

It happened, however, that Don Ramiro de Guzman did not consider his honour sufficiently avenged by his enemy’s exile. One night, when the Court was at Medina del Campo, he ambushed himself in his turn with some followers of his own, and attacked the Admiral, to return him the blows received from his son. From this indignity the Admiral was saved by his escort. But when Isabella heard of the affair, she treated Guzman as a rebel, seized his castles in Leon and Castile, as she would have seized his person, but that to escape her anger he fled to Portugal for shelter.25

No less determined was her conduct in the matter of the Grand-Mastership of Santiago.

There were in Spain three religio-military orders: the Knights of Alcantara, the celibate Knights of Calatrava—who were the successors of the Knights Templars—and the Knights of Santiago. This last order had been founded for the purpose of affording protection to the pilgrims who came into Spain to visit the shrine at Compostella of St. James the Apostle, who is alleged to have been the first to bear the message of Christianity into the Iberian Peninsula.26 These pilgrimages, chiefly from France, were a great source of revenue to the country, and it became of importance to ensure their immunity from the predatory hordes that infested the highways. Further, the Knights of Santiago had found employment for their arms in the crusade waged on Spanish soil against the Moors, in token whereof they wore the Crusader’s cross in red upon their white cloaks. They acquired great power and wealth, possessing castles and convents in every part of Spain, so that the office of Grand Master of the Order was one of great weight and importance—too great, in the opinion of Isabella, to be in the hands of a subject.

This opinion she boldly manifested in 1476, when the death of Don Rodrigo Manrique left the office vacant. She took horse, as was her custom, and rode to Huete, where the Chapter of the Order was assembled upon the business of the necessary election, and she frankly urged that to an office so exalted it was not fitting that any but the King should be elected.

The proposal was not received with satisfaction. Ferdinand was an Aragonese, and despite the union of the two kingdoms which must be completed when he should succeed to the throne of Aragon, he was still looked upon as a foreigner by the Castilians. Under Isabella’s insistence, however, a compromise was effected. The Chapter consented to elect Ferdinand to the office of Grand-Master on condition that he should nominate a gentleman of Castile to act as his deputy for the discharge of the duties of the position. This was done, and Alonso de Cardenas—a loyal servant of the Sovereigns—was chosen as the royal deputy. Thus Isabella established it that the appointment of Grand-Master of the Order of Santiago should be a royal prerogative.

Even more strikingly than in either of the instances cited does the Queen’s resolute, spirited nature manifest itself in her manner of dealing with a revolt that took place in Segovia at the commencement of her reign.

During the war with Portugal the Catholic Sovereigns had entrusted their eldest daughter, the Princess Isabella, to the care of Andrés de Cabrera, the Seneschal of the Castle of Segovia, and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla.

Cabrera, a man of stern and rigid equity, had occasion to depose his lieutenant, Alonso Maldonado, from his office, conferring this upon his own brother-in-law, Pedro de Bobadilla. Maldonado conspired to avenge himself. He begged Bobadilla’s permission to remove some stones that were in the castle, upon the pretext that he required them for his own house, and he sent some men of his own to fetch them. These men, who were secretly armed, having gained admission, stabbed the sentry and seized the person of Bobadilla, whilst Maldonado, with other of his people, took possession of the castle itself. The inmates of the Alcazar, hearing the uproar, fled to the Homenaje Tower, taking with them the Infanta, who was five years of age at the time. Fortified in this, they defied Maldonado when he attacked it. Finding it impregnable, the rebel ordered Bobadilla to be brought forward, and threatened the besieged that unless they admitted him he would put the prisoner to death.

To this threat Cabrera’s dignified reply was that Maldonado must do as he pleased, but the gates would not be opened to him.

By this time a multitude of the townspeople had gathered there, alarmed by the disturbance and armed for any emergency. To these Maldonado cunningly represented that what he was about was being done in their interests against the overbearing tyranny of the Governor, and he invited them to join hands with him in the cause of liberty to complete the work he had so excellently begun. The populace largely took sides with him, so that Segovia was flung into a state of war. There was constant fighting in the streets, and the gates were in the hands of the rebels, with the exception of that of St. John, which was held for Cabrera.

It is believed that it was Maria de Bobadilla herself who, stealing undetected from the Alcazar, escaped from Segovia and bore to the Queen the news of what was taking place, and the consequent peril of the royal child.

Upon learning this, Isabella instantly repaired to Segovia. The leaders of the rebellion had news of her approach, but dared not carry their insubordination to the length of closing the gates against her. They went so far, however, as to ride out to meet her and to attempt to deny admittance to her followers; and her counsellors, seeing the humour of the populace, urged her to be prudent and to accede to their wishes. But her proud spirit flared up under that cautious advice.

“Learn,” she cried, “that I am Queen of Castile, that this city is mine, and that no conditions are to be imposed upon me before I enter it. I shall enter, then, and with me all those whom I may judge necessary for my service.”

With that she ordered her escort forward, and entered the city by a gate that was held by her partisans, and so won through to the Alcazar.

Thither flocked the infuriated mob, and thundered at the gates, demanding admission.

The Queen, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the Cardinal of Spain and the Count of Benavente, who were with her, ordered the gates to be thrown open and as many admitted as the place would hold. The populace surged into the courtyard, clamouring for the Seneschal. To meet them came the slight, fair young queen, alone and fearless, and when in their astonishment they had fallen silent—

“People of Segovia,” she calmly addressed them, “what do you seek?”

Dominated by her serenity, awed by her majesty, their fury fell from them. Humbly now they urged their grievance against Cabrera, accusing him of oppression, and imploring of the Queen’s grace his demission.

Instantly she promised them that their request should be granted; whereupon the revulsion was complete, and the mob that but a few moments earlier had been yelling threats and execrations now raised their voices loyally to acclaim her.

She commanded them to return to their homes and their labours, and to leave the administration of justice in her hands, sending her their ambassadors to prefer their complaint against Cabrera, which she would investigate.

As she commanded so it was done, and when she had examined the accusations against the Seneschal and satisfied herself that they were groundless, she announced him free from guilt and reinstated him in his office, the conquered people bowing submissively to her ruling.27

In 1477 Isabella moved into Andalusia, in which province, as elsewhere, law and order had ceased to exist. She entered Seville with the proclaimed intention of demanding an account of the guilty. But at the very rumour of her approach and the business upon which she came, some thousands of the inhabitants whose consciences were uneasy made haste to depart the city.

Alarmed by this depopulation, the Sevillans implored the Queen to sheathe the sword of justice, representing that after the bloody affrays that for years had been afflicting the district there was scarcely a family in which some member was not answerable to the law.

Isabella, gentle and merciful by nature—which renders her association with the Inquisition the more deplorable—lent an ear to these representations, and granted an amnesty for all crimes committed since the death of Henry IV. But she was not so lenient with those who had prostituted the justice which they administered in her name. Informed of the judges who were making a trade and extortion of their judgments, she punished them by deposition, and herself fixed the scale of legal costs to be observed in future.

Finding a mass of impending law-suits which the misrule of the past years had put upon the province, she directed her attention to clearing up this Augean stable. Every Friday, attended by her Council, she sat in the great hall of the Alcazar of Seville to hear the plaints of the most humble of her subjects; and so earnestly and vigorously did she go to work that in two months she had disposed of litigations that might have dragged on for years.

Upon her accession she had found the royal treasury exhausted by the inept administration of the last two reigns and the prodigal, reckless grants that Henry IV and Juan II had made to the nobles. This condition of things had seriously embarrassed the Catholic Sovereigns, and they had been driven to various expedients to raise the requisite funds for the war with Portugal. Now that the war was at an end, they found themselves without the means necessary to maintain the royal state.

Isabella made a close investigation of the grants that had been made by her brother and father, and she cancelled all those that were the fruit of caprice and wantonness, restoring to the Crown the revenues that had been recklessly alienated and the taxes that the country had hitherto paid to none but the bandits who oppressed it.

Similarly she found the public credit entirely ruined. Under the late king such had been the laxity, that in three years no less than 150 public mints had been authorized, and this permitted such abuses that a point had been reached where it almost seemed that every Spaniard minted his own money, or that, as Rosseeuw St. Hilaire puts it, “coining was the country’s chief industry.”