She reduced the number of mints to five, and exercised the severest control over their output, thereby liberating trade from the fear of fraud that had been stifling it. An increased and steadily increasing prosperity was the almost immediate result of this wise measure.

Having restored order in the country, she turned her attention to the Court, applied herself to the purification of its morals, and set about converting it from the disgusting licence that had prevailed in her brother’s time.

Herself of a rigid chastity, she exacted the same purity of conduct in all the women who approached her, and she submitted the noble damsels brought up at her Court to the very strictest surveillance. Loving the King very sincerely, she was notoriously inclined to jealousy: let him but look too assiduously upon any lady of her train, and Isabella found a way to remove her from the Court. She saw to it that the pages who were in waiting upon her should be given a good education, that thus they might avoid the idleness which unfailingly leads to waste of character and to immorality. Finally, according to Bernaldez,28 she extended her moral reforms to the convents, which were no less in need of them than the Court, and she corrected and punished the great depravity that was permeating all conventual orders.29

There is no chronicler of her reign who does not dilate upon her great piety. Bernaldez compares her to St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine,30 and describes her as very devoted to the Holy Faith and very obedient to Holy Church. Bernaldez, of course, was writing after the establishment of the Inquisition, of which he, in common with other contemporary and subsequent chroniclers, very warmly approved; and he may have been very largely influenced by consideration of the support which she had unfortunately lent to its introduction into Castile. But that her piety was extreme and sincere we infer from the moment that we see her, after the battle of Toro, which definitely gave her the crown, going barefoot to church to a service of thanksgiving.

Yet, however ardent her piety, it would not carry her the length of recognizing in the Pope the temporal over-lord of Castile.

From the thirteenth century the power of the Church had been increasing in Spain under the dogma of the spiritual sovereignty of Rome over all the Catholic churches of the world. The clergy had amassed enormous wealth with that facility so peculiarly their own when the occasion is afforded them, and to this end they had abused the reckless, foolish liberality of Isabella’s predecessors.

Lucius Marinæus informs us that the incomes of the four archbishoprics—Toledo, Santiago, Seville, and Granada—amounted to 134,000 ducats,31 whilst those of the twenty bishoprics came to some 250,000 ducats.

Surrounded as she was by priestly counsellors whom she respected, she nevertheless manifested plainly her impatience of the clerical usurpation of the rights of the Crown. The chief of these abuses was no doubt that practised by the Pontiff himself, in conferring upon foreigners the highest and richest benefices of the Church of Spain, ignoring that it was the prerogative of the Crown to name the bishops—always subject to papal confirmation. That Isabella, devout and priest-surrounded as she was, should have dared to oppose the Holy See and the terrible Pope Sixtus IV, as fearlessly as she had opposed her predatory nobles, is perhaps the highest proof that history can yield of her strength of character.

Her smouldering indignation flared out when the Pope, ignoring her nomination of her chaplain, Alonzo de Burgos, to the vacant bishopric of Cuenca, appointed his own nephew, Raffaele Riario, Cardinal of San Sisto, to that vacant see.

Twice already had she sought the pontiff’s confirmation of nominees of her own for other benefices—the Archbishopric of Saragoza and the Bishopric of Tarragona—and on each occasion her nominee had been set aside in favour of a creature of the Pope’s. But this third contemptuous disregard of her prerogative was more than her patience could endure. The Catholic Sovereigns refused to ratify the appointment of Riario, and begged the Pope—submissively at first—to cancel it.

But the harsh, overbearing Sixtus returned an answer characteristic of his arrogant nature. It was his, he announced, to distribute at his pleasure all the benefices of Christendom; and he condescended to explain that the power which it had pleased God to confer upon him on earth could not be limited by any will but his own, and that it was governed only by the interests of the Catholic Faith, of which he was the sole arbiter.

But his stubbornness met a stubbornness as great. The Catholic Sovereigns replied by withdrawing their ambassador from the Papal Court, and issuing an injunction to all Spanish subjects to leave Rome.

Matters were becoming strained; an open rupture impended between Spain and the Vatican. But the Sovereigns had notified the Pope that it was their intention to summon a general council of the Church to settle the matter in dispute, and no Pope of those days could contemplate with equanimity a general council assembled for the purpose of sitting in judgment upon his decrees. Whatever the result, since at these councils the papal authority was questioned, it must follow that thereafter that authority would be impaired. Therefore this was the stock threat employed to bring a recalcitrant pontiff to a reasonable frame of mind.

It made Sixtus realize the strength of purpose that was opposed to him; and, knowing as he did that this resoluteness backed an undeniable right which he had violated, he perceived that he dared carry insistence no further. So, despite his earlier assertion that the power which he held from God could be limited by no will but his own and governed by no consideration but that of the interests of the Faith, he gave way completely.

The three royal nominees were duly confirmed in the vacant sees, and Sixtus gave an undertaking that in future he would make no appointments to the benefices of Spain save of such ecclesiastics as the Catholic Sovereigns should nominate.32

It is to be added that in acting upon this signal victory which she had won, Isabella used the faculty it gave her with such pious wisdom, sincerity, and discretion that had the Pope but followed her example in the appointment of dignitaries, it would have contributed to the greater honour and glory of the Church. For she sternly opposed the granting of benefices upon any grounds but those of absolute merit.

Having won her way in this, she was the better able to curb the predatory habits of her clergy by edicts that limited their power to proper clerical confines.

“It is amazing,” comments Pulgar, “that a woman should have been able, single-handed and in so little time, by her judgment and perseverance to accomplish what many men and great kings had been unable to do in many years.”

“Properly to judge the notable improvements,” says Rosseeuw St. Hilaire,33 “which this reign effected in industry and agriculture, it would be necessary to follow year by year the table of ordinances issued by the Catholic Sovereigns. It would be seen that in many things the genius of the founders of the Castilian Monarchy forestalled the work of centuries. The happy results of these reforms were soon experienced everywhere: the highways were purged of malefactors, new roads of communication were opened up, rivers were bridged, consular tribunals established in commercial centres, consulates created in Flanders, England, France, and Italy; with maritime commerce expanding daily and in a measure with the progress of industry, new buildings sprang up in every city, and the population rapidly increased. All announced a new era of regeneration in Castile. Contemporary writers, struck by these prodigies, exalt with one voice this glorious reign which opens new destinies to Spain.”

It is certain that in no other country in Europe at this date were the laws so well maintained and the rights of the individual so well protected. Justice was rigorously done, there were no longer arbitrary imprisonments and sequestrations, whilst the unequal and capricious taxation of the past was abolished for all time.

“Such,” says Marinæus, “was the strict justice meted out to each in this happy reign that all men, nobles and knights, traders and husbandmen, rich and poor, masters and servants, were treated alike and received equally their share of it.”

Where so much was good, where so much stout service was done to the cause of progress and civilization, it is the more deplorable to find in this reign the one evil thing that is now to be considered—so evil that it must be held to counterbalance and stultify all the excellences of Isabella’s sway.

The particular praise which so far we have heard their contemporaries bestowing upon the Catholic Sovereigns, is a praise which every man in every age must echo.

But there was praise as loud upon another score, as universally uttered by every contemporary and many subsequent historians, some no doubt because they were sincere in the deadly bigotry that inspired it, others because they did not dare to express themselves in different terms.

“By her,” cries Bernaldez, as a climax to his summing-up of her many virtues and wise provisions, “was burnt and destroyed the most evil and abominable Mosaic, Talmudic, Jewish heresy.”

And Mariana, the historian, accounts the introduction of the Inquisition into Spain the most glorious feature of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. He is setting it above all the moral splendours of that day when he exclaims:

“Still better and happier fortune for Spain was the establishment in Castile at about this time of a new and holy tribunal of severe and grave judges for the purpose of inquiring into and punishing heretical pravity and apostasy....”34

It would be unjust to suppose that there is a man to be found to-day in the Church of Rome, of which the Spanish Inquisition was a deplorable and integral part, who can turn with us in other than regret to consider this black shadow that lies across one of the brightest pages of history.

CHAPTER V
THE JEWS IN SPAIN

You have seen the Catholic Sovereigns instilling order into that distracted land of Spain, enforcing submissiveness to the law, instituting a system of police for the repression of brigandage, curtailing the depredations of the nobles, checking the abuses and usurpations of the clergy, restoring public credit, and generally quelling all the elements of unrest that had afflicted the State.

But one gravely disturbing element still remained in the bitter rancour prevailing between Christian and Jew.

“Some clerics and many laymen,” says Pulgar,35 “informed the Sovereigns that there were in the Kingdom many Christians of Jewish extraction who were Judaizing36 again and holding Jewish rites in their houses, and who neither believed the Catholic Faith nor performed the Catholic duties. They implored the Sovereigns, as they were Christian princes, to punish that detestable error, because if left unpunished it might so spread that our Holy Catholic Faith must receive great harm.”

Exactly to realize the position at the time, and the force behind the arguments employed to induce the Catholic Sovereigns to complete the ordering of the kingdom by the repression of the re-Judaizing, or apostasy, of the New-Christians—as the baptized Jews and their descendants were termed—it is necessary to take at least a brief retrospective survey of the history of the Israelites in Spain.

At what period the Jews first appeared in the peninsula it is not easy to determine with accuracy.

Salazar de Mendoza and other ancient historians, who base their writings upon the work of Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, put forward views upon this subject that are curious rather than important.

They assert that the Kingdom of Spain was founded by Tubal, the son of Japhet, who had Europe for his portion when the division was made among the sons of Noah. Hence it was called Tubalia, and later on Sepharad by the Jews, and Hesperida by the Greeks. They hold that the first Jews in the Iberian Peninsula were probably those who came with Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Chaldea, and that he brought with him, in addition to Chaldeans and Persians, ten tribes of Israel, who peopled Toledo,37 and built there the most beautiful synagogue that had been theirs since the temple of Solomon. This synagogue, Mendoza states, afterwards became the Convent of Santa Maria la Blanca (a statement which the architecture of Santa Maria la Blanca very flatly contradicts). He further informs us that they built another synagogue at Zamora, and that those who worshipped there always prided themselves—his point of view, of course, is narrowly Christian—that to them had been addressed St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.

They founded a university at Lucena (near Cordova), and schools where the law was taught, so that the holy Jewish religion spread rapidly, and was observed throughout Spain until the coming of Our Lord into the world. Then, in 37 A.D., the Apostle St. James came to preach the new gospel in Iberia, “so that Spain was the first land after Judea to receive the holy law of grace.” Following the writings of Vargas, he goes so far as to say: “and although to many it has seemed apocryphal that the Toledo Jews wrote to denounce the Passion of Our Lord, the assertion is not without good foundation.”38

Amador de los Rios is probably correct in his opinion that the Jews made their first appearance in Spain during the Visigothic dominion, after the fall of Jerusalem; and scarcely had they settled in the peninsula when they began to experience the bitterness of persecution. But after they had been delivered from this by the Saracen invaders, to whom by race and creed they were fairly sympathetic, they enjoyed—alike under Moslem and Christian rule—a season of prosperity in Spain, which endured until the close of the thirteenth century. And this notwithstanding the undercurrent of mutual contempt and hatred, of Christian for Jew and Jew for Christian, that was invincible in an age of strong religious feeling.

To the Christian every Jew he encountered was his natural and hereditary enemy, a descendant of those who had crucified the Saviour; therefore he was an object of execration, a man upon whom it must be meritorious to avenge the world’s greatest crime which had been perpetrated by his forbears.

The Jew, on the other hand, held the Christian in a contempt as thorough. From the standpoint of his own pure and unadulterated monotheism, he looked scornfully upon a religion that must appear to him no better than an adaptation of polytheism, developed upon the doctrines of one whom the Jews had rejected as an impostor who had attempted to usurp the place of the promised Messiah. To the truly devout Jew of those days the Christian religion can have been little better than a blasphemy. Nor was that the only source of his contempt. Looking back upon his own splendid ancestry, upon the antiquity of his race and the high order of its culture—the fruit of centuries of intellectual evolution—what but scorn could he entertain for these Spaniards of yesterday’s hatching, who were just emerging from the slough of barbarism?

It is clear that mutual esteem between the races was out of all question in an age of strong religious prejudices. Toleration, however, was possible, and the Jew applied himself to win it. To this end he employed at once the vices and the virtues of the unfortunate, which centuries of tribulation had rendered inherent in him.

Armed with a stoicism that was almost pitiful, he donned a mask of indifference to confront expressed hatred and contempt; to violence he opposed cunning and the long-suffering patience that is so peculiarly his own—the patience that is allied with a high order of intelligence; the patience which, interpreted into “an infinite capacity for taking pains,” has been urged as the definition of genius, and is the secret of the Jew’s success wherever he is established.

In the cohesion in a foreign land of this people that cannot keep together as a nation, and in their extraordinary commercial acuteness, lies the strength of the Jews. They grew wealthy by their industry and thrift, until they were in a position to purchase those privileges which in Christendom are the birth-right of every Christian. Their numbers, too, made it difficult in Spain to treat them with contumely; for upon the reasoned estimate of Amador de los Rios39 there were close upon a million Jews in Castile at the end of the thirteenth century.

They formed by their solidarity—as they always do—an imperium in imperio, a state of their own within the state; they had their own language and customs; they were governed by their own laws, which were enforced by their Rabbis and chiefs, and they pursued their own religion unmolested, for even the observation of the Sabbath was respected by the Castilians. Thus they came to create for themselves in a foreign country a simulacrum of their own native land.

It is true that they were afflicted from time to time by sporadic, local persecutions; but in the main they enjoyed a tolerance and religious liberty which the poor harried Albigenses beyond the Pyrenees might well have envied. For the Church, which had already established the Inquisition, was very far—for reasons that shall be considered in the next chapter—from instigating any persecution of the Children of Israel. Thus, Honorius III, whilst carrying forward the policy of Innocent III, and enjoining the extirpation of heretics in Southern France and elsewhere, confirmed (November 7, 1217) the privileges accorded to the Jews by his predecessors upon the throne of St. Peter. These were that no Jew should be constrained to receive baptism; that should he incline to embrace the Christian Faith he must be received in it with love and benevolence; that his feasts and religious ceremonies must be respected by Christians; that the whipping or stoning of Jews be forbidden and punished; that their burial-places be held sacred.

And when King Ferdinand III—afterwards canonized—wrested Seville from the Moors (1224), he made over one of the best districts of the city to the Jews, and gave them the four mosques contained in it that they might convert them into synagogues.

The only restraint placed upon them by the law was that they must refrain, under pain of death, from attempting to proselytize among Christians, and that they must show respect for the Christian religion.

These were the halcyon days of Hebrew prosperity in Spain. Their distinguished abilities were recognized, and they won to many positions of importance in the government. The finances of the kingdom were in their control, and Castile prospered under their able administration of its commerce. Alfonso VIII, in whose reign it is estimated there were 12,000 Jews in Toledo alone, employed a Jew as his treasurer, and did not disdain to take a Jewess for his mistress—an interesting little fact in view of the law that was so soon to be promulgated on that subject.

Hardly less than their value to the nation’s commerce were their services to science, art, and literature. They excelled particularly in medicine and chemistry, and the most skilful doctors and surgeons of the Middle Ages were men of their race.

In the middle of the thirteenth century a change unfortunately set in, and this external harmony so laboriously established was disturbed by an excrescence of the real feelings that had never ceased to underlie it. Largely the Jews were themselves to blame. Deluded by the religious liberty that was conceded them, by the dignities to which men of their faith had climbed, and by the prosperity which they had attained, they failed to perceive that their accumulated wealth was in itself a menace to their safety.

Emboldened by the consideration shown them, they committed the imprudence of giving a free rein to their Oriental taste for splendour; they surrounded themselves with luxury, and permitted themselves an ostentatious magnificence in their raiment and equipages, and thus proclaimed the wealth they had been amassing through generations of comparative obscurity.

Had they confined themselves to this strictly personal display all might yet have been well. But being dressed and housed in princely fashion, they put on princely ways. They grew haughty and arrogant with the horrible arrogance of wealth. They allowed their disdain of the less affluent Christians to transpire in their contemptuous bearing towards them, and being unchecked in this it was but another step to abuse the privileges which they enjoyed.

Their parade of wealth had provoked envy—the most dangerous and maleficent of the passions implanted in the human heart. Their arrogance and cavalier bearing stirred that envy into activity.

Questions arose touching the sources of their wealth. It was propounded against them that their usurious practices had ruined many of the Christians whom they now dared to spurn. And although usury had been sanctioned and it had been proclaimed lawful for them to charge a rate of interest as high as 40 per centum, it was suddenly remembered that usury had in all times been uncompromisingly condemned by the Church—and by the term usury the Church then understood any interest, however slight, paid upon borrowed money.

Fanaticism began to stir uneasily in its slumber, and presently, under the spur of greed, it roused itself and reared its horrid head. Public feeling against the Israelites was increased by the fact that they had practically acquired control of the ever-unpopular offices for the collection of taxes.

The populace grew menacing. Evil tales concerning them were put about, and they were accused, among other ritual abominations, of practising human sacrifices.

Whether there was any real ground for the accusation is one of those historical mysteries that baffle the student. On the one hand it seems impossible to collect sufficient data to establish any single one of the many specific accusations made; whilst on the other hand, in view of the persistence with which the charge crops up in different countries and at different epochs,40 it would be presumptuous to dismiss it as groundless.

The first official recognition of the accusation is to be found in the code known as the Partidas, promulgated by Alfonso XI (1256-1263), which contains the following clause:

“As we hear that in some places the Jews on Good Friday make a mocking commemoration of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, stealing boys and crucifying them, or making waxen images and crucifying these when boys are not procurable, we order that should it become known that hereafter, in any part of our realm, such a thing is done, all those whom it is ascertained are connected with the deed shall be arrested and brought before the King. And when he shall have satisfied himself of the truth of the charge he shall have them put to death, as many as they may be.”41

Llorente mentions four specific cases of ritual murder, to which he appears to attach credit:

1250.—A choir-boy of the Metropolitan Church of Zaragoza, named Domingo de Val, crucified by Jews. He was afterwards canonized and worshipped at Zaragoza as a martyr.

1452.—A boy crucified by Jews at Valladolid.

1454.—A boy from the lordship of the Marquess of Almarza, near Zamora, crucified. His heart was afterwards burnt and the ashes were consumed in wine by the Jews who attended the ceremony. The body was afterwards discovered by a dog, and this led to the arrest of the culprits and their conviction.

1468.—At Sepulveda, in the Bishopric of Segovia, a boy was taken on the Thursday of Holy Week, and on Good Friday he was crowned with thorns, whipped, and finally crucified. The Bishop, D. Juan Arias, having received intelligence of this crime, instituted an inquiry which resulted in the arrest of several men, who, being convicted, were put to death.

Llorente gives as his authority for the third and fourth cases the “Fortalicium Fidei” of Espina—by no means an authority to be unquestioningly accepted. For the second he mentions no authority whatever; whilst for fuller information upon the first he refers his readers to the “Historia de Santo Domingo de Val,” which is of no more authority than most works of this class.42 But the canonization of this victim gives rise to thought; for it was never the way of the Church of Rome to proceed recklessly and without due evidence in such matters. Even if it were, however, it would be necessary in this case to show a motive for such recklessness. The only motive possible would be the desire to create justification for a persecution of the Jews. But, as has been said—and as shall presently be made abundantly clear—it never was the aim of the Church of Rome to engage in such persecution or to incite to it.

The famous case of the crucifixion of the “Holy Infant” of La Gardia, whose trial was directed by Torquemada himself, shall be considered in its proper place.

As is well known, the practice of human sacrifice is an extremely old one; and it has been associated in varying forms with many widely different cults. The earliest absolutely historical instance of Jews resorting to it is probably that quoted by Dr. J. G. Frazer (in “The Golden Bough”) from the “Historia Ecclesiastica” of Socrates. The scholiast relates how in 416, at Imnestar in Syria, a company of Jews during one of their festivals fell to deriding Christians and their Christ. At the height of their frenzy they seized a boy, bound him to a cross, and hung him up. A brawl was the result, and the authorities intervened to make the Jews pay dearly for their crime.

Amador de los Rios, in dealing with the spread of this charge against the Spanish Hebrews in the thirteenth century, attributes it to the subject’s having been made the theme of an exceedingly dramatic narrative poem in the “Milagros de Nuestra Señora” by Gonzalo de Berceo. At the same time he does not go so far as to urge that the story upon which the ballad was founded may not have had its roots in fact. On the contrary, he suggests that such may have been the case, and having chronicled the persistence of the accusation, he refrains from expressing any definite opinion on the subject, hesitating either to accept, or to dismiss as idle calumnies, these charges of ritual murder.

From the able arguments that have been put forward on this same subject by Frazer and Wendland, it is to be concluded that in any case the Christians were mistaken in assuming that these alleged crucifixions held at the Feast of Purim—whether of human beings or of effigies—were intended as a mockery of the Passion of the Redeemer. Their origin is a far more ancient one, involving a rite of which the Sacrifice of Golgotha may itself have been an individual celebration—the commemoration of the hanging of Haman—which, again, was the continuation of a ritual practised by the Babylonians and acquired from them by the Jews during their captivity.43

Whatever may be the truth of this matter of ritual murder, there is no doubt that these rumours were diligently spread to inflame the popular mind against the Jews.

Fanatical monks—ignoring the papal injunctions of forbearance and toleration towards the Children of Israel—went forth through Castile preaching the iniquity of the Jews and God’s wrath to fall upon the land that harboured them. Thus incited, and perceiving profit in the business, the faithful rose to destroy them. Massacres and pillages were the inevitable result, although as a rule the authorities were prompt to intervene and repress the populace’s combined fanaticism and quest for plunder.

But when in 1342 the Black Death spread over Europe, the Dominicans and others renewed their denunciations, and led men to believe the Jews responsible for the pestilence that afflicted the land. In Germany they were ruthlessly given to choose between death and baptism, and they suffered horribly until Pope Clement VI stepped in to save them. He besought the Emperor to restrain his murderers; and finding that his pleadings lacked effect, he launched the thunderbolts of excommunication against all who should continue to engage in the persecution of the Jews.

Stricken with terror before that awful menace of the Church, the faithful paused in the carnage, and the voice of denunciation fell silent.

Thus, for a season, they won a little measure of peace. But throughout the fourteenth century spurts of persecution broke out here and there, and massacres took place in Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. The authorities, too, with the precedent of the Partidas before them, whilst not going the length of sanctioning, or even permitting violence where they could repress it, yet practised upon the Jews the most flagrant and cruel injustices. Of these the worst instance is that of the tax of 20,000 gold dobles levied upon the aljamas of Toledo by Henry II on his accession in 1369. To realize this sum he ordered the public sale not only of the property of the Jews, but actually of their persons into slavery, as is to be seen by his decree.44

The persecutions with which they were visited were chiefly procured by the monks, who went abroad preaching against them, fomenting the hatred of the Christians against a people who were largely their creditors. Even where the religious incentive was insufficient, the easy way of wiping out debts which this gratification of their piety afforded proved irresistible to a people whose flagrant immorality—in every sense of the term—went hand in hand with their perfervid devoutness.

These persecutions, as we have said, the authorities made haste to quell. But there arose presently a rabid fanatic who proved altogether irrepressible. His name was Hernando Martinez. He was a Dominican friar, and Canon of Ecija. Of his sincerity there can be no doubt; and their sincerity is the most terrible thing about such men, blinding them to the point of utter madness. He was ready to suffer any martyrdom sooner than be silent in a cause in which he considered it his sacred duty to give tongue. About this sacred duty he went forth, screaming his denunciations of the Jews, frenziedly inciting the mob to rise up and destroy this accursed race, these enemies of God, these crucifiers of the Saviour. Indeed, he could not have shown a more fierce and frothing hatred of them had they been the very men who at the throne of Pilate had clamoured for the blood of Christ—and for whose pardon the gentle Redeemer had prayed in His expiring moments: a matter this which escaped the attention of the Archdeacon of Ecija, being—like many another—too full of piety to find room for Christianity in his soul.

Appeals against him were made to the Archbishop of Seville, whose official, or representative, he was. He was ordered by his Archbishop to desist, and when in flagrant disobedience to his superior he continued to preach his gospel of blood and hatred, appeals were made to the King, and even to the Pope; and by King and Pope was he commanded to cease his inflammatory sermons.

But he defied them all alike. In his fanatical fury he carried his contumacy so far as to call in question the papal authority, and to declare illicit the sanction given by the popes for the erection and preservation of synagogues. This was perilously akin to heresy. Men had been sent to the stake for less, and Hernando Martinez must have been utterly mad if he conceived that the Church would permit him to continue the diffusion of such doctrines.

He was brought before the episcopal court to answer for his words. He answered defiantly—told them that the breath of God was in him, and that it was not for men to stop his mouth.

Thereupon Don Pedro Barroso—the archbishop—ordered that he should stand his trial for contumacy and heresy, and meanwhile suspended him from all jurisdiction and all duties as archiepiscopal official.

It happened, however, that Barroso died shortly thereafter, before the trial could take place; and Martinez contrived to get himself elected by the Chapter to the position of one of the provisors of the diocese pending the appointment of a successor to Barroso. Thus he resumed his power and the faculty to preach; and he used it so ruthlessly that in December of 1390 several synagogues in Seville were laid in ruins by the mob acting in obedience to his incitement.

The Jews appealed to the King for protection, and the authorities, now thoroughly roused, ordered that Martinez be deposed from his office and forbidden to preach, and that the demolished synagogues be rebuilt by the Chapter which had made itself responsible by electing him.

But Martinez, ever defiant, disregarded both King and Chapter. He pursued his bloodthirsty mission, stirring up a populace that was but too ready to perceive—through his arguments—a way to perform an act that must be pleasing to God whilst enriching itself at the same time. What populace could have been proof against such reasoning?

Finally, in the summer of 1391, the whole country was ablaze with fanatical persecution. The fierce flames broke out first in Seville, under the assiduous fanning of the deposed archdeacon.

Three years before, in view of the harm that it was urged the Jews were doing to religion by their free intermingling with Christians, King John I had ordered them to live apart in districts appointed for them, which came to be known as Juderias (Jewries or ghettos). It was commanded that the Christians should not enter these, and that for purposes of trade the Jews should come to the public markets and there erect tents, but they must own no house or domicile beyond the precincts of the Juderias, and they must withdraw to these at nightfall.

Into the Juderia of Seville the mob now penetrated, wrought by Martinez to a pitch of frenzy almost equal to his own. They went armed, and they put the place to sack and slaughter, butchering its every tenant without discrimination or pity for age or sex. The number of the slain has been estimated at some four thousand, men, women, and children.45

From Seville the conflagration spread to the other cities of Spain, and what had happened there happened in Burgos, Valencia, Toledo, and Cordova, and further in Aragon, Cataluna, and Navarre, whilst the streets of Barcelona are said to have run with the blood of immolated Jews.

Into the Jewry of every town went the infuriated mob to force Christ—as these Christians understood Him—upon the inhabitants; to offer the terror-stricken Jews the choice between steel and water—death and baptism.

So mighty and violent was the outbreak that the authorities were powerless to quell it, and where they attempted to do so with any degree of determination they were themselves caught in the fury of the populace. Nor did the slaughter cease until the Christians were glutted, and some fifty thousand Jews had perished.

The churches were now filled with Jews who came clamouring for baptism, having perceived that through its waters lay the way to temporal as well as to spiritual life, and having in most cases—in the abject state of terror to which they had been reduced—more concern for the former than for the latter. Llorente estimates the number of baptized at over a million, and this number was considerably swelled by the conversions effected by St. Vincent Ferrer, who came forth upon his mission to the Jews in the early years of the fifteenth century, and who induced thousands to enter the fold of Christianity by his eloquence and by the marvels which it is said he wrought.

The fury of the mob having spent itself, peace was gradually restored, and little by little those Jews who had remained faithful to their religion and yet survived began to come forth from their hiding-places, to assemble, and, with the amazing, invincible patience and pertinacity of their race, to build up once more the edifice that had been demolished.

But if the sword of persecution was sheathed, the spirit that had guided it was still abroad, and the Jews were made to experience further repressive measures. Under decrees of 1412-13 they lost most of the few privileges that the late king had left them.

It was ordained by these that henceforth no Jew should occupy the position of a judge even in a Hebrew court, nor should any Jew be permitted to bear witness. All synagogues were to be closed or converted into Christian temples, with the exception of one in every town in which Jews should be established. They were forbidden to continue the practice of the professions of medicine, surgery, and chemistry, in which they had specialised with such good results to the community. They were no longer to occupy the offices of tax-collectors, and all commerce with Christians was forbidden them. They must neither buy nor sell in trade with Christians, nor eat with them, nor use their baths, nor send their children to the same schools. The ghetto was ordered to be walled round, so as to be enclosed and cut off from the rest of the city, and they were forbidden to issue from it. Intercourse between a Jew and a Christian woman was forbidden under pain of death by burning, even though the woman were a prostitute. They were forbidden to shave, and compelled to allow their beards and hair to grow, in addition to which they were ordered to wear as a distinguishing mark a circle of red cloth upon the shoulder of their gabardines. They were further compelled to hear three sermons annually from a Christian preacher, whose aim it was to pour abuse and contumely upon them, to inveigh against their accursed race and creed, to assure them of the certainty of the damnation that awaited them, and to exalt before them the excellences of the Catholic religion (based, be it remembered, that we may fully savour the irony, upon Faith, Hope, and Charity).46

When King John I had established the Juderias in 1388, curtailing at the same time the privileges which until then the Jews had enjoyed—at least by paying for them—there had been many who, finding the restraint imposed upon them altogether intolerable, had abandoned the faith of their fathers and embraced Christianity. Those who held the affairs of this world in esteem had sought baptism, and whilst many in doing so had entirely broken with the past—and often, as is the way of converts, become zealots in their observance of the faith embraced—many others, whilst outwardly complying with the obligations of the Christian religion, continued in secret to observe the law of Moses and their Jewish rites. Similarly these further decrees against their liberty had the effect of causing still more numerous conversions to Christianity.

These converts were termed “New-Christians” by the Spaniards. By those of their own race who had remained faithful they were called “marranos”—a contemptuous epithet derived from Maran-atha, (“The Lord is coming”), but supposed by the Christians to signify “accursed.” It came into general use before very long.

These New-Christians, as a consequence of their conversion, gained not merely the privileges recently lost to them as Jews, but found themselves upon a footing of absolute equality with the Old-Christians; every profession was open to them, and by applying themselves to these with all their energy and intelligence, they found themselves before very long in possession of some of the highest offices in the land.

But in the meanwhile the rigour of the decrees of 1412 came to be considerably relaxed; a degree of liberty and of intermingling with Christians was permitted to the Jews, and many of the offices which they had occupied of old came once more under their control, chiefly those concerned with commerce and finance and the farming of the taxes. Under the deplorable rule of Henry IV the nobles, whose slave he was, demanded that he should “expel from his service and States the Jews who, exploiting public misery, have contrived to return to the appointments of tax-gatherers.”

The weak King agreed, but neglected to execute his promise; it was presently forgotten, and the Jewish section of the community was allowed to continue under the conditions of ease we have described. Under these conditions was it found by Ferdinand and Isabella upon their accession, nor does it appear that they paid any particular attention to it until invited to do so by the “clerics and laymen” who, as Pulgar47 tells us, represented to them that in the re-Judaizings that were taking place was matter for their jurisdiction.

CHAPTER VI
THE NEW-CHRISTIANS

It must clearly be understood that so far the Inquisition, which for some three centuries already had been very active in Italy and Southern France, had not reached Castile.

Even as recently as 1474, when Pope Sixtus IV had ordered the Dominicans to set up the Inquisition in Spain, and whilst in obedience to that command inquisitors were appointed in Aragon, Valencia, Cataluña, and Navarre, it was not held necessary to make any appointment in Castile, where no heresy of any account could be perceived. Trials of such offences against the Faith as might occur were conducted by the bishops, who were fully empowered to deal with them; and such offences being rare, the necessity for a special tribunal did not suggest itself, nor did the Pope press the matter, desirous though he might be to see the Inquisition universally established.

There was, of course, a large Hebrew population, and also a considerable number of Moslems, in the peninsula. But these did not come within the jurisdiction of any ecclesiastical court. The Inquisition itself could take no cognizance of them, as they did not offend against the Faith.

Explanation is perhaps necessary. We touch here upon a point on which the religious persecution known as the Inquisition compares favourably with any other religious persecution in history, and in common justice this point should not—as but too frequently has been the case—be obscured. There is too little to be urged in favour of this tribunal so terribly inequitable in its practices that we can afford to slur over the one feature of its constitution that is invested with a degree of equity.

Whatever may have been the case in the course of civil and popular persecutions, whatever may have been done by a frenzied populace at the instigation of odd fanatical preachers acting without the authority of their superiors in giving rein to the fierce bigotry they had nurtured in their souls, the Church herself, it must be clearly understood, neither urged nor sanctioned the persecution of those born into any religion that was not in itself a heresy of the Roman Faith. The tribunal of the Inquisition was established solely—and moved solely—to deal with those who apostatized or seceded from the ranks of the Roman Church, precisely as an army deals with deserting soldiers. Fanatical, horribly narrow, cruelly bigoted as was the spirit of the Inquisition, yet the inquisitors confined their prosecutions to apostates, to the adulterers of a faith whose purity and incorruptibility they had made it their mission to maintain.

If the Church repressed liberty of conscience, if she stifled rationalism and crushed independence of thought, she did so only where her own children were concerned—those who had been born into the Catholic Faith or who had embraced it in conversion. With those born into any other independent religion she had no concern. To Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, and Pagan, and to the savages of the New World, when it came presently to be discovered, she accorded the fullest religious freedom.

To appreciate this, it is but necessary to consider such enactments as those of Honorius III for the protection of the Jews, of Clement VI, who threatened their persecutors with excommunication, and the action of Pope and Archbishop in the case of the inflammatory sermons of Hernando Martinez. It is sufficient to consider that when the Jews were driven out of Spain—as shall presently be seen—they actually found a refuge in Rome itself, and were received with kindliness by Pope Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia), which in itself is one of the oddest ironies that ecclesiastical history can offer.

And if this is not sufficient, let us for a moment consider the immunity and comparative peace enjoyed by the Jews who dwelt in Rome itself, in their district of Trastevere.

They were a recognized section of the community in the Papal City. On his coronation procession each Pope would pause near the Campo de’Fiori to receive the company of Jews that came, headed by the Rabbi, to pay homage to their sovereign—precisely as their ancestors had come to pay homage to the emperor.

To the Vicar of Christ the Rabbi would now proffer the rolls of the Pentateuch, swathed in a cloth. The Pope would take them into his hands, to show that he respected the law contained in them, and would then put them behind him, to signify that this law now belonged to the past. From behind the Pontiff the Rabbi would receive back his sacred scriptures, and depart with his escort, usually accompanied by the jeers, insults, and vituperations of the Roman populace.48

It will be understood, then, that the Inquisition’s establishment in Spain was not urged for the purpose of persecuting the Jews. It had no concern with Jews, if we confine the term purely to its religious meaning, signifying the observers of the law of Moses. Its concern was entirely with the apostasy of those who, although of the Jewish race, had become Christians by conversion. By the subsequent secret re-Judaizings, or return of these New-Christians to the religion of their fathers (which they had abandoned out of material considerations), they came within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and rendered themselves liable to prosecution as heretics, a prosecution which could never have overtaken them had they but continued in their original faith.

There is no denying that many of those who had been baptized against their will, as the only means of saving their lives when the fury of the Christian mob was unleashed against them, had remained Jews at heart, had continued in secret to practise the Jewish rites, and were exerting themselves to bring back to the fold of Israel their apostate brethren. Others, however, upon receiving baptism may have determined to keep the law to which they now pledged themselves and to persevere honestly in Christianity. Yet many of the old Jewish observances were become habitual with them: the trained—almost the hereditary—repugnance to certain meats, the observance of certain feast days, and several minor domestic laws that are part of the Jewish code, were too deeply implanted in them to be plucked up by the roots at the first attempt. Time was required in which they could settle into Christian habits; two or three generations might be necessary in some families before these habits came to be perfectly acquired and the old ones to be entirely obliterated. Had those who urged the Sovereigns to introduce the Inquisition into Castile, or had the Sovereigns themselves but perceived this and exercised the necessary and reasonable patience in the matter, Spain might have been spared the horrors that took root in her soil and sapped the vigour and intellectual energy of her children, so that in her case decadence pressed swift and close upon the very heels of supreme achievement.

Execrable as is the memory of the Inquisition to all the world, to none should be it so execrable as to Spain, since the evil that it wrought recoiled entirely upon herself.

It was on the occasion of Isabella’s first visit to Seville—that punitive visit already mentioned—that the establishment of the Holy Office in Spain was first proposed to her. The King was at the time in Estremadura upon the business of fortifying his frontiers against Portugal.

The proposal came from Alonso de Ojeda, the Prior of the Dominicans of Seville, a man who enjoyed great credit and was reputed saintly (“vir pius ac sanctus,” Paramo calls him).

Seeing her zeal to put down lawlessness and to purify and restore order to the country, Ojeda urged upon her notice the spread of the detestable Judaizing movement that was toward. He laid stress upon the hypocrisy that had underlain so many of the conversions of the Jews. He pointed out—with some degree of justice—that these men had made a mock of the Holy Church, had defiled her sacraments, and had perpetrated the most abominable sacrilege by their pretended acceptance of the Christian faith. He urged that not only must this be punished, but that the havoc which these Judaizers were working among the more faithful New-Christians, and the proselytizing which they went so far as to attempt among Old-Christians, must be checked.

To carry out this urgently-required purification, he implored the Queen to establish the Inquisition.49

There was a speciousness, and even a justice, in his arguments which must have impressed that pious lady. But her piety, intense as it was, did not carry her to the lengths required of her by her priestly counsellor. The balance of her splendid mind was singularly true. She perceived that here was matter that called for a remedy; but she perceived also the fanaticism inspiring the friar who stood before her, and realized how his fanaticism must exaggerate the evil.

She was aware also of the extreme malevolence of which the New-Christians were the object. By their conversion they might have deflected the religious hostility of the Castilians; but the more deeply-rooted racial antagonism remained. It not only remained, but it was quickened by the envy which these New-Christians were exciting. The energy and intelligence inherent in men of their race were serving them now, as they had served them before, to their undoing. There were no offices of eminence in which New-Christians were not to be found; there were none in which they did not outnumber the Old-Christians—the pure-blooded Castilians.

This the Queen knew, for she was herself surrounded by converts and the descendants of converts. Several of her counsellors, her three secretaries—one of whom was that chronicler, Pulgar, whose record of the situation has been quoted—and her very treasurer were all New-Christians.50

These men Isabella knew intimately, and esteemed. Judging the New-Christians generally by those in her immediate service, she was naturally led to discount Ojeda’s imputations against them. She perceived the source of these imputations, and she must have taken into consideration the ineradicable bitterness of the popular feeling against Jews and the intensity of a prejudice which extended—as we have said—to the New-Christians to such an extent that they continued to be known as “Judios,” notwithstanding their conversion, so that often in contemporary chronicles it is difficult to determine to which class the writer is referring.

We have said that, in spite of conversions, the racial hostility remained. The Christian attitude towards the Hebrew had not changed in the hundred years that were sped since, under the incitings of the Archdeacon of Ecija, the mob had risen up and massacred them. They were the descendants of the crucifiers always.

A vestige of this feeling lingers to this day in the peninsula. In the vocabulary of the Portuguese lower orders, and even of the indifferently educated, there is no such word as “cruel.” “Jew” is the term that has entirely usurped its functions, and as an injunction against cruelty to man or beast, “Don’t be a Jew!” (Não seja judeu!) is still the only phrase.

No conception of what was the popular feeling at the time can be conveyed more adequately than by a translation of the passage from Bernaldez concerning the manners and customs of the Jews. Bernaldez was a priest, and therefore, to some extent, an educated man—as in the main his history bears witness—yet a piece of writing so ludicrously stupid and detestably malicious as this passage can only have emanated from a mind in which bigotry had destroyed all sense of proportion.

The only historical value of the passage lies in the deplorable fact that undoubtedly it may be accepted as a faithful mirror of the prejudice that existed in Isabella’s day.

It runs:

“Just as heretics and Jews have always fled from Christian doctrines, so they have always fled from Christian customs. They are great drinkers and gluttons, who never lose the Jewish habit of eating garbage of onions and garlic fried in oil, and of meat stewed in oil, which they use instead of lard; and oil with meat is a thing that smells very badly, so that their houses and doorways stink vilely of that garbage; and they have the peculiar smell of Jews in consequence of their food and of the fact that they are not baptized. And although some have been baptized, yet the virtue of the baptism having been annulled by their credulity [i.e. their adherence to their own faith] and by their Judaizing, they stink like Jews. They will not eat pork save under compulsion. They eat meat in Lent and on the eve of feast days.... They keep the Passover and the Sabbath as best they can. They send oil to the synagogues for the lamps. Jews come to preach to them in their houses secretly—especially to the women, very secretly. They have Rabbis to slaughter their beasts and poultry. They eat unleavened bread in the Jewish season. They perform all their Jewish rites as much in secret as possible, and women as well as men seek whenever possible to avoid the sacraments of Holy Church.... They never confess truthfully, and it happened that a priest, once confessing one of these, cut a fragment of cloth from his garment, saying: ‘As you have never sinned, let me have this as a relic to heal the sick.’... Not without reason did Our Lord call them generatio prava et adultera. They do not believe that God rewards virginity and chastity, and all their endeavour is to multiply. And in the days of the strength of this heresy many monasteries were violated by their merchants and wealthy men, and many professed nuns were ravished and derided, they not believing in or fearing excommunication, but rather doing this to vituperate Jesus Christ and the Church. Commonly swindling people by many wiles and cheats, as in buying and selling, they have no conscience where Christians are concerned. Never would they undertake agriculture, ploughing or tilling or raising cattle, nor have they ever taught their children any office but that of sitting down to earn enough to eat by as little labour as possible. Many of them have raised up great estates in a few years, not being sparing of their thieving and usury, maintaining that they earn it from their enemies....”51