All the mercy they vouchsafed a relapsed heretic who confessed and expressed repentance was the mercy of being strangled at the stake before his body was burnt.

Eymeric instructs inquisitors to see that the prisoner is visited and entertained on the subject of contempt for this world, the miseries of this life and the joys of Paradise. He should be given to understand that there is no hope of his escaping temporal death, and he should be induced to put the affairs of his conscience in order. He is to be accorded the sacraments of Penitence and the Eucharist if he solicits them with humility. Further, the inquisitor is advised not to visit him personally, lest the sight of him should excite the sin of anger in the doomed man, and so turn him from the sentiments of patience and penance which are to be inspired in him.

It would seem at least that the inquisitors had no delusions as to the sentiments which the sight of them inspired in their victims, just as it seems that they were able to endure these with Christian resignation—perhaps even with that sense of martyrdom of him who accounts himself misunderstood or misjudged.

After some days thus employed in preparing the prisoner for death, the inquisitor should advise the secular justices of the day and hour and place when and where he would abandon to them a heretic. At the same time an announcement should be made to the people inviting them to attend, as the inquisitor is to preach a sermon of the Faith, and those who are present will gain the usual indulgences.123

It is not necessary at present to enter into particulars of the dread ceremonial, the ghastly, almost theatrical, solemnities that went to compose the greatest horror that has sprung from the womb of Christianity: the Auto de Fé.

“An Asiatic,” says Voltaire, “arriving in Madrid on the day of an Auto de Fé, would doubt whether here was a festival, a religious celebration, a sacrifice, or a massacre. It is all of these. They reproach Montezuma with sacrificing human captives to God. What would he have said had he witnessed an Auto de Fé?”124

Occasion to enter into these details will occur later. We are more concerned at the moment with the words of the inquisitors than with their acts, and it is necessary on the subject of the laws that governed the Auto de Fé to touch upon quite the most extraordinary of all the quibbles by means of which the Holy Office avoided—in the letter—committing an irregularity.

Nothing in the whole of its jurisprudence savours more rankly of hypocrisy than this matter of abandoning a heretic to the secular arm. It is the very last word in that science which it is the fashion to call “Jesuitism,” but which we think might quite as aptly and justly be termed “Dominicanism.” Yet it would be very rash to say that these men were prompted by conscious hypocrisy. Such is certainly not the inference to be drawn from their jurisprudence. Stupidity—the stupidity of the man of one idea, of the man who is able to perceive but one thing at a time—was, rather than hypocrisy, responsible for what they did.

They were imbued with a passion for formality, for procedure that should be scrupulously correct, scrupulously in accordance with the letter of the law; and they justified their circumvention, their perversion of its spirit, with crazy arguments that must at least have been convincing to themselves, obfuscated as they were by the fanaticism that bubbled through their extraordinary intelligences.

We say that these arguments must have been convincing to themselves, because we find them in books that were never intended to be perused by any but inquisitors and ecclesiastics. Since these books were never meant to be placed before the world, no suspicion can attach to them of having deliberately and hypocritically resorted to sophistries for the purpose of hoodwinking the lay mind.

It was themselves they hoodwinked—by the arguments they themselves conceived—and although it is undeniable that they practised a deception which must provoke the scorn of every thoughtful man, yet it must be remembered that this deception was the self-deception that lies in wait for every fanatic, whatever the subject of his fanaticism. By staring too long and too intently at one object, that object itself becomes blurred and indistinct.

“Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine.”

That was the principle that governed them. Conceive it!

The tenet that a Christian must not be guilty of shedding blood or causing the death of a fellow-creature has been touched upon more than once in these pages. It has been seen how in the very dawn of Christianity the Christian’s refusal to bear arms in the service of the State gave rise to friction with the Roman authorities, and, being construed into insubordination, was one of the causes of the persecutions to which Christians were subjected in the first and second centuries. As time went on, under stress of the necessities of this world, the Christian was forced to abandon that fine and loftily humanitarian ideal. Soon he had not only abandoned it under pressure of expediency, but he had forgotten it altogether; so that he donned the cross of the crusader, and went forth sword in hand, exultantly, to shed the blood of the infidel in the name of that tender Founder Whose disciple had brought to Rome the great Message of Forbearance.

But however much it might be accounted justifiable and even necessary for the Christian layman to wield the sword, the priest still continued under the prohibition to shed blood or compass the death of any man. And if a priest lay under such an injunction, so must a tribunal that was controlled by priests.

Therefore it follows that not only was it admittedly illicit for the inquisitor to pass a capital sentence, to send a man to his death, but even to be in any way a party to such an act.

This was the letter of the law, and, happen what might, that letter must suffer no violence. Nor did it. When the accused was found guilty of heresy, when he was impenitent, or relapsed, the inquisitor was careful that the sentence he passed contained no single word that could render him responsible for the delinquent’s death. Far from it. The inquisitors earnestly implored the secular justiciaries to whom they abandoned him not to do him any hurt whatever.

But consider the actual formula of the sentence as prescribed by Eymeric. It concluded thus:

“The Church of God can do no more for you, since you have already abused its goodness.... Therefore we cast you out from the Church, and we abandon you to the secular justice, beseeching it none the less, and earnestly, so to moderate its sentence that it may deal with you without shedding your blood or putting you in danger of death.”125

They were careful not so much as to say that they delivered him to the secular arm; for delivery suggests activity in a matter in which they must remain absolutely passive. They merely abandoned him. Pilate-like, they washed their hands of him. If the secular justiciaries chose to bear him away and burn him at the stake in spite of their “earnest intercessions” to the contrary, that was the secular justiciaries’ affair.

Thus was the letter of the law most scrupulously observed, and the inquisitor displayed in his intercession on the heretic’s behalf the benignity proper to his sacerdotal office. His conscience was entirely at peace.

For the rest, he knew, of course, that there was a bull of Innocent IV, known as “ad extirpanda,” which compelled the secular justiciaries, under pain of greater excommunication, and of being themselves prosecuted as heretics and fautores, to put to death within a term of not more than five days any convicted heretic taken within their jurisdiction.

Francesco Pegna recommends inquisitors to be careful not to omit the intercession on the prisoner’s behalf, lest they should render themselves guilty of an irregularity. At the same time he raises the interesting question whether an inquisitor can reconcile this intercession with his conscience—not, as you might suppose, upon the score of the dissimulation it entails; but purely on the ground that it is most strictly forbidden to intercede on behalf of heretics; to do so, indeed, is to incur suspicion of being a befriender of heretics—an offence as punishable as heresy itself.

This question he has no difficulty in answering. Thus:

“In truth it would not be permitted to employ for a heretic an intercession that would be of any advantage to him, or which tended to hinder the justice which is to be executed upon his crime, but only an intercession whose aim it is to relieve the inquisitor of the irregularity he might otherwise incur.”

He goes on to say that when the heretic has been abandoned to the secular justiciaries, the latter must pronounce their own sentence and conduct him to the place of execution, permitting him to be accompanied by pious men, who will pray for him and not leave him until he shall have delivered up his soul. And he reminds the inquisitors—though it hardly seems necessary—that should the magistrates delay in putting to death a heretic who has been abandoned to them, they must be regarded as fautores and themselves prosecuted.

Innocent IV, as we have seen, allowed the magistrates a term of five days in which to do their duty in this matter, and in Italy it was usual to take the heretics back to prison after sentence, and bring them forth again upon a week-day—always within the prescribed term—to be burnt. In Spain, however, the custom was that the magistrates having pronounced their own sentence—as soon as the heretic was abandoned to them—should immediately proceed to execute it.

According to some authorities the sentence, by which was meant the Auto de Fé generally, should not take place in church. Pegna agrees with these, but not upon the score of the desecration of sanctuary, which was their reason. He agrees because in a large open space higher scaffolds can be erected for the Auto, and greater multitudes can assemble to witness this uplifting spectacle of the triumph of the Faith. On the same grounds does he belittle those who maintain that heretics should not be put to death on Sundays. He considers it quite the best day of the week, and excellent the Spanish custom that appoints it for the Auto, “for,” he says, “it is good that large multitudes should attend, so that fear may turn them from evil ways; the spectacle being one that inspires the attendance with terror and presents a fearful image of the last judgment.”

That it is expedient to put heretics to death no pious authority has ever ventured to dispute. But there have been differences of opinion on the subject of the means by which this should be done. The scholiast is entirely on the side of the large majority that considers fire the proper instrument, and actually cites the Saviour’s own authority for this: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch that is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned” (John xv. 6).

If the accused should happen to be a cleric, he must be unfrocked and degraded by a bishop before being arrayed in the hideous sanbenito and abandoned to the secular arm, whilst those convicted of contumacy were—if still absent at the time of the sentence—to be burnt in effigy pending their capture, when, without further trial, they would be burnt alive.

In effigy also were burnt those convicted after death, these effigies being cast into the flames together with the remains of the dead man, which were exhumed for the purpose.

Reference has several times been made here to the sanbenito which was imposed upon all whom the Holy Office found guilty of heresy, whether reconciled or abandoned, and also upon those who were suspected in the degree violenter.

In this garment they attended the Auto de Fé, and went to execution if they were abandoned; or they might be required to wear it for varying periods after reconciliation, and in some instances for as long as they lived, to advertise their infamy.

It was the perversion into a garb of shame and disgrace of the penitential garment originally prescribed by St. Dominic; for whereas once it—or, rather, that from which it was derived—had been worn even by princes as an outward mark of contrition for the sins into which they had fallen, it was now imposed that it might subject its wearer to opprobrium and contempt.

St. Dominic’s instructions were that it should be a sackcloth habit, of the kind worn by his own brotherhood, and that its colour might be at the discretion of the wearer so long as it was sombre. As it had ever been the custom of the Church to bless the “sack” or tunic worn by members of religious confraternities or by those upon whom it had been imposed as a penance, such a garment was called a saco bendito, which in course of time was contracted into sanbenito, though also known by its proper Spanish name of zamarra.

When the crusade against the Albigensian heretics was at its height in Southern France, not only did the crusaders wear the cross upon their garments, but all faithful Catholics assumed it for their protection; for—as on the night of the St. Bartholomew, some four centuries later—no man’s life was safe if he did not display that device. St. Dominic desired that the penitent should enjoy the same protection, but so that his penance should still be proclaimed, he was ordered to wear two crosses, one on each breast.

Later, when the wars of religion had ceased, and the general wearing of the cross was abandoned, the Council of Toulouse decreed, in 1229, that these penitential crosses should be yellow, whilst the Council of Beziers, four years later, going further into the matter, ordained that they should be two and a half hands long (vertical) by two hands wide (horizontal), and that they should be made of cloth of the width of three fingers. Instead of being worn upon the breast, as hitherto, they were now placed one on the breast and one on the back, with a third on the hood or veil if hood or veil were worn.

For abettors of heresy the following solemn penance was enjoined by the Council of Tarragona in 1242:

“On All Saints’, on the First Sunday in Advent, on the feasts of Christmas, the Circumcision, the Epiphany, St. Mary of February (Purification), St. Mary of March, and all Sundays in Lent, the penitents shall go to the Cathedral to take part in the procession. They shall be dressed only in their shirts, barefoot, their arms crossed, and they shall be whipped in the procession by the bishop or parish priest. Similarly shall they repair to the Cathedral on Ash Wednesday in their shirts, barefoot, their arms crossed, and submit to banishment from church for all Lent; so that during that season they must remain at the church door and hear the service thence. On Thursday in Holy Week they shall come to the church to be reconciled in accordance with the canonical provisions, it being understood that this penance of remaining out of the church through Lent and of being whipped in procession on the days appointed shall be performed yearly for the remainder of the penitents’ lives.”

At first, and down to Eymeric’s day, the sanbenito preserved its original form—a tunic similar to that worn by the members of regular orders. But in the fourteenth century it was altered to a scapulary or tabard, with an opening at the top through which the head was passed; it was to be of the full width of the body, and to descend no lower than the knees, lest it should too closely resemble the scapulary which the regulars wore in addition to their tunic. Soon after it was resolved that it should be of yellow sackcloth, and that the crosses should be red.

Once this stage was reached, it may be said that the transition from a garment solely of penitence into a garment chiefly of shame and infamy was complete.

We have said that the imposition of the sanbenito had been falling into desuetude during the fifteenth century. But for Torquemada it might indeed have become entirely obsolete. It happened, however, that the Prior of Holy Cross perceived the virtues of it, the salutary results to be obtained from parading the victims of the Holy Office in that hideous garb. Therefore he revived it, and strongly enjoined its use by all offenders save those against whom there was no more than evil reputation, and who submitted themselves to be purged of this canonically.

It was not, however, until the famous Ximenes de Cisneros, who became Grand Inquisitor some ten years after Torquemada’s death—that the sanbenito attained its full development, the form which it was to preserve until the extinction of the Inquisition.

Cisneros substituted for the ordinary rectangular cross worn on back and breast of the sanbenito an aspa, or St. Andrew’s cross, and he otherwise disposed that the sanbenito might proclaim the offence and sentence of its wearer. Three varieties were devised for those who were abjuring a heresy of which they had incurred suspicion: the suspect of the degree leviter wore a perfectly plain sanbenito without any cross or other device; the suspect vehementer wore upon back and breast one arm only of the St. Andrew’s cross; the suspect violenter was made to wear the full cross.

Those actually convicted of heresy wore in addition to the sanbenito a tall mitre, or pyramidal cap, made of cardboard and covered with yellow sackcloth; and that their precise condition might be distinguished, the following differentiations were prescribed: the heretic who repented before the passing of sentence, and who—not being a relapsed—was not to die by fire, bore upon the breast and back of his sanbenito and upon the front and back of his coroza, as the mitre was called, a full St. Andrew’s cross; the relapsed heretic who had repented before the Auto bore, in addition to the crosses, the device of a bust upon burning faggots on the nether part of his sanbenito; further his sanbenito and coroza were flecked with tongues of flame, which pointed downwards to signify that he was not to die by fire, although his body was to be burnt. He had deserved the charity of being strangled at the stake before the faggots were ignited. And this mercy, be it added, the Holy Office conceded to any heretic who at the eleventh hour confessed his guilt and desired to make his peace with the Church and die, as it were, upon her loving bosom. To this end the condemned was accompanied from the Auto to the stake by two friars, who never ceased to exhort him to make confession, save his body from the temporal torment of physical fire, and his soul from the eternal torment of spiritual fire.

Finally, the impenitent heretic bore the same devices as the relapsed penitent, but in his case the tongues of flame pointed upwards to show that he was to die by them, and his sanbenito was further daubed with crude paintings of devils—horrible, grotesque caricatures—to advertise the spirits ruling over his soul.

Something should by now have been gathered of the spirit of the Inquisition as reflected in the pages of Eymeric and his commentator Pegna in that “Directorium” upon which such copious draught has been made for these chapters upon the Jurisprudence of the Holy Office. It is worth while, before proceeding, to cite another author’s views upon Justice and Mercy as understood by the Inquisition, and to consider an illuminating passage from the pen of Garcia de Trasmiera.

This Trasmiera—to whom reference has been made already—was an Aragonese, an inquisitor who lived in the seventeenth century—nearly two hundred years after the epoch with which we are here concerned. We might go to a score of other sources, from Paramo downwards, for very similar sentiments, and the only reason for choosing this particular passage from Trasmiera is that it is almost in the nature of an epitome.

He seems to summarize the very arguments with which Torquemada and his delegates convinced themselves not merely of the righteousness, but of the inevitability—if they were to do their duty by God and man, and fulfil the destinies for which they had been sent into this world—of the task to which they had set their hands.

“These two virtues of Mercy and Justice,” says the Aragonese writer, with all the authority of an Evangelist, “are so closely united in God, although we imperfectly judge them to be opposed, that Divine Wisdom but avails Itself of the one, the more gloriously to exercise the other. The most proper effect of the Divine Mercy, none doubts, is the salvation of souls, and who can doubt that what in this court of the Inquisition appears to be rigour of Justice is really medicine prescribed by Mercy for the good of the delinquents? Just as it would be a barbarous judgment to attribute to cruelty on the part of the surgeon the cautery of fire which he employs to destroy the contagious cancer of the patient, so it would be crass ignorance to suppose that these laws which appear to be severities are prescribed for any purpose other than that which governs the surgeon in curing his patient, or a father in punishing his child. Says the Holy Ghost: ‘Who does not use the rod hates the child,’ and elsewhere: ‘God punishes whom He loves.’”126

Could perversity of interpretation go further? In Rome, in Torquemada’s day, the Father of Christianity was granting absolutions, commuting the punishment of hanging to pecuniary penances where such penances were solicited, and justifying such commutation by reminding Christianity that God does not desire the death of a sinner, but rather that he should live and be converted.

It would seem as if Inquisitor and Pontiff did not see eye to eye in this matter of Mercy and Justice. To the credit of the Pontiff be it said.

Trasmiera, echoing the inquisitorial casuistry of centuries, holds that the rigour of Justice is prescribed by Mercy for the good of the delinquents. The impenitent Judaizer was sent to the stake. How could that redound to his good in this world or the next? We could admit a certain logical consummation of their arguments if the inquisitors had confined themselves to burning those who repented, or those who were innocent even; by burning these whilst they were in a state of grace they would have ensured their salvation by abstracting them from all perils of future sin. But to burn the impenitent upon such grounds as they themselves urged, believing, as they did, that just as surely as his mortal part was burnt there at the stake, just so surely would his immortal part burn through all eternity in hell—that was, clearly, by their own lights, to perpetrate the murder of his soul.

CHAPTER XIV
PEDRO ARBUÉS DE EPILA

There is no difficulty in believing Llorente’s statement—based upon extracts from contemporary chronicles—to the effect that the Inquisition was not looked upon with favour in Castile. It was impossible that a civilized and enlightened people should view with equanimity the institution of a tribunal whose methods, however based fundamentally upon those of the civil courts, were in the details of their practice so opposed to all conceptions of equity.

In no Catholic country does the cherishing of a fervent faith, in itself, imply respect for the clergy. Nor, for that matter, does the respect of any religion in itself signify respect for those who administer it. It appears to do so; it is even prescribed that it should; but in point of fact it seldom does, other than with simple peasant classes. The ministers, after all, are men; but by virtue of their office they labour under disadvantages greater than the ordinary man’s. When they display the failings to which all men are subject, these failings wear a much graver aspect by virtue of the office they hold and the greater purity which that office implies. Holiness is looked upon as the priest’s trade, and it is expected that he should conduct that trade honestly, as any layman conducts the affairs by which he earns his livelihood. The only test of honesty in the priest, of whatever denomination, lies in his own conduct; and when this falls short of that high standard in which he claims to deal, he earns a contempt akin to that which overtakes the trader who defrauds his creditors. It is remembered then, to his disadvantage, that under his cassock the cleric is a man, and so subject to all the faults that are man’s heritage. But it happens that in addition to these he is subject to other failings that are peculiarly of the cassock, failings which the world has never been slow to discern in him. The worst of these is the ecclesiastical arrogance, the sacerdotal pride which has been manifested by priests of all cults, but which in none is so intolerable as in the Christian, who expounds a gospel of humility and self-abnegation. He is akin to a feudal tyrant who grinds the faces of his serfs whilst he lectures them upon the glories of democracy.

Of such priests Spain of the fifteenth century had an abundant share. She knew them and mistrusted them, and hence she mistrusted any organization of theirs which should transcend the strict limits of their office.

Now, the tribunal of the Inquisition laid itself peculiarly open to this mistrust in consequence of the secrecy of its proceedings—a secrecy, as we know, greatly increased by the enactments of Torquemada. Its trials were not conducted in open court; the examination of witnesses took place in secret and under the veil of anonymity, so that the world had no assurance of the honesty of the proceedings. When it happened that a man was arrested, the world, as a rule, knew him no more until he came forth, candle in hand, arrayed in a sanbenito to play his tragic part in an Auto.

By virtue of this secrecy the Inquisition had invested itself with a power far greater, more subtle, and farther-reaching than that of any civil court. The might of the Grand Inquisitor was almost boundless, and he was unanswerable to any temporal authority for the arbitrariness with which he exercised it. Rivalling the sovereign power in much, in much else the Grand Inquisitor’s went above and beyond it, for not even the King himself could interfere in matters of the Faith with one who held his office directly from the Pope.

The net which Torquemada cast was of the very widest; the meshes of that net were of the closest, so that no man, however humble, could account himself safe; its threads were of the strongest, so that no man, however powerful, could be sure of breaking through were he once brought within its scope.

What, then, but terror could Torquemada and his grim machinery inspire? It is not difficult to believe the sometime secretary of the Inquisition when he assures us that the Holy Office was not favourably viewed in Spain. The marvel is that whilst the Castilians were chilled by awe into inactivity and meek submission, it should have remained for Aragon, which already had known an inquisition for a century, to rise up in rebellion.

And yet what may seem at first glance a reason why Aragon should have submitted to Torquemada’s rule in matters of the Faith, may be the very reason of its rash and futile rebellion. For a hundred years already the court of the Holy Office had been operating there; but its operations, never vigorous, had become otiose. In this inactive form Aragon had suffered it to continue. But of a sudden it was roused from that lethargy by Torquemada. It was bidden to enforce its stern decrees and other sterner decrees which he added to those already in existence, and to follow the course of arbitrary procedure which he laid down. Never welcome in Aragon, it now became intolerable. The New-Christians, who knew the fate of their Castilian brethren, went with fear in their countenances, and despair and its fierce courage in their hearts.

In the spring of 1484 Ferdinand held his Cortes at Tarragona. He was attended on the occasion by Torquemada, and he seized the opportunity to present to his kingdom the gaunt Prior of Holy Cross, its pontifically-appointed Grand Inquisitor.

Torquemada’s activity matched his boundless zeal. At once he convened a council composed of the Vice-Chancellor of Aragon, Alonso de Caballeria—himself a New-Christian—the Royal Councillor Alonso Carillo, and some doctors of canon law, that they might decide upon the course to be adopted in Aragon to the end that the Inquisition might be conducted with absolute uniformity there, as in Castile. This done, he proceeded to appoint inquisitors to the Archbishopric of Zaragoza, and his choice fell upon Frey Gaspar Yuglar and Frey Pedro Arbués de Epila, Master of Theology and Canon of the Metropolitan Church of Zaragoza.

After the publication of the “Instructions” drawn up that same year in Seville, Torquemada further appointed to the Holy Office of Zaragoza a fiscal advocate, an apparitor, notaries, and receivers, whereupon that office began immediately to exercise its functions under the new system.

At once the courage of despair roused the New-Christians to opposition. Amongst them were many who held high positions at court, persons of great influence and esteem, and these immediately determined to send a deputation to the Vatican and another to the Sovereigns to voice their protests against the institution of this tribunal in Aragon, and to beseech that it be abolished, or at least curtailed in its powers and inhibited from proceeding to confiscation, which was contrary to the law of the land.

This last was a shrewd request, based no doubt upon the conviction that, deprived of the confiscations upon which it battened, the tribunal must languish and very soon return to its former inoperative condition.

Nor were the conversos the only ones to denounce the procedure of the Holy Office. Zurita records that many of the principal nobles of Aragon rebelled against it, protesting that it was against the liberties of the kingdom to confiscate the property of men who were never allowed to learn the names of those who bore witness against them.

As well might they have appealed against death—for death itself was not more irresistible or inexorable than Torquemada. All the fruit borne by their labours was that those who had lent their names to the petition were ultimately prosecuted as hinderers of the Holy Office. But this did not immediately happen.

In the meanwhile Torquemada’s delegates, Arbués and Yuglar, went about the business entrusted to them with that imperturbability which the “Directorium” enjoins. They published their edicts, ordered arrests, carried out confiscations, and proceeded with such thoroughness that it was not long before Zaragoza began to present the same lurid, ghastly spectacles that were to be witnessed in the chief cities of Castile.

In the following May (1485) they celebrated with great solemnity the first Auto de Fé, penancing many and burning some. This was followed by a second Auto in June.

The despair and irritation of the New-Christians mounted higher at these spectacles. It is believed to have reached its climax with the sudden arrest of Leonardi Eli, one of the most influential, wealthy, and respected conversos of Zaragoza.

Those who had put the petition afoot, abandoning now all hope of obtaining any response either from the Sovereigns or from Rome, met to concert other measures. Their leader was a man of influence named Juan Pedro Sanchez. He had four brothers in influential positions at Court, who had lent their services in the matter of the petition to the Sovereigns.

A meeting took place in the house of one Luis de Santangel, and Sanchez urged a desperate remedy for their desperate ills. They must strike terror into their terrorizers. He proposed no less than the slaughter of the inquisitors, urging with confidence that if they were slain no others would dare to fill their places. In this he seems to have underestimated the character of Torquemada.

The proposal was adopted, an oath of secrecy was pledged, plans were laid, measures were taken, and funds were collected to enable these plans to be executed. Six assassins were chosen, among whom were Juan de Abadia and his Gascon servant Vidal de Uranso, and Juan de Esperandeu. This last was the son of a converso then lying in the prisons of the Inquisition, whose property had already been confiscated; so that he was driven by the added spur of personal revenge. There was, too, the further incentive of a sum of five hundred florins promised by the conspirators to the slayer of Arbués, and deposited by them for that purpose with Juan Pedro Sanchez.127

Several early attempts to execute this project were baffled by circumstances. It would seem, moreover, that Arbués had received some warning of what was in store for him—or else he was simply conscious of the general hatred he had incurred—for he exercised the greatest prudence, took to wearing body armour, and was careful not to expose himself in any way; all of which does not suggest in him that eagerness for the martyr’s crown with which his biographer Trasmiera would have us believe that he was imbued.

At last, however, the assassins found their opportunity. Late on the night of September 15 of that year, 1485, they penetrated into the Metropolitan Church to lie in wait for their victims when these should come to the midnight office imposed by the rule of their order.

Juan de Abadia, with his Gascon servant Uranso and another, entered by the main door. Esperandeu and his companions gained admittance through the sacristy.

About the pillars of the vast church, in the gloom that was scarcely relieved by the altar-lamp, they waited silently, “like bloody wolves,” says Trasmiera, “for the coming of that gentle lamb.”

Towards midnight there was a stir overhead; lights beat faintly upon the darkness; the canons were assembling for matins in the choir.

A note of the organ boomed through the silence, and then Arbués entered the church from the cloisters.

It seemed that even now chance did not favour them, for Arbués came alone, and their aim was to take both the inquisitors.

The dominican was on his way to join his brethren in the choir. He carried a lantern in one hand and a long bludgeon in the other. Nor did his precautions end in this. He wore a shirt of mail under his white habit, and there was a steel lining to his black velvet skull-cap. He must indeed have gone in fear, that he could not trust himself to matins save armed at all points.

He crossed the nave on his way to the staircase leading to the choir. But as he reached the pulpit on the left he halted and knelt to offer up the prescribed prayer in adoration of the Sanctissimum Sacramentum. He set the lantern down upon the ground beside him, and leant his club against a pillar.

Now was the assassins’ opportunity. He was at their mercy. And although to strike now was to leave half their task undone, they must have resolved that rather than postpone the matter again in the hope of slaying both inquisitors, they had better take the one that was delivered up to them.

The chanting overhead muffled the sound of their steps as they crept up behind Arbués, out of the blackness into the faint wheel of yellow light cast by his lantern.

Esperandeu was the first to strike, and he struck clumsily, doing no more than wound the inquisitor in the left arm. But swift upon that blow followed another from Uranso—a blow so violent that it smashed part of the steel cap, and, presumably glancing off, opened a wound in the inquisitor’s neck, which is believed to have been the real cause of his death.

It did not, however, at that moment incapacitate him. He staggered up, and turned to the staircase that led to the choir. But now Esperandeu returned to the assault, and drove at the Dominican so furiously with his sword that, despite the shirt of mail with which Arbués was protected, the blade went through him from side to side.

The inquisitor fell, and lay still. The organ ceased abruptly, and the assassins fled.

There was confusion now in the choir. Down the stairs came the friars with their lanterns, to discover the unconscious and bleeding inquisitor. They took him up and carried him to bed. He died forty-eight hours later at midnight on Saturday, September 17, 1485.128

By morning all the town had heard of the deed, and the effect which it produced was very different from that for which its perpetrators had hoped. The Old-Christians, some moved by religious zeal, some by a sense of justice, snatched up weapons and went forth to the cry of “To the fire with the conversos!”

The populace—an uncertain quantity, ever ready to be swayed by the first voice that is loud enough, to follow the first leader who points the way—took up the cry, and soon Zaragoza was in turmoil. Through every street rang the clamours of the multitude, which threatened to offer up one of those hecatombs in which fire disputes with steel the horrid laurel of the day.

The uproar penetrated to the Palace of Alfonso of Aragon, the seventeen-year-old Archbishop of Zaragoza. It roused that bastard of Catholic Ferdinand from his slumbers. A high-spirited lad, he summoned the grandees of the city and the officers of justice, and rode out at their head to meet and quell the rioters. But only by a promise that the fullest justice should be done upon the murderers did he succeed in dispersing them and restoring order to that distracted city.

“Divine Justice,” says Trasmiera, “permitted the deed, but not its impunity.”

Rash indeed had been the action of the New-Christians, and terrible was the penalty exacted, terrible the price they were made to pay for the life they had taken. In conceiving that they could intimidate by such an act a man of Torquemada’s mettle, they displayed a lamentable want of judgment, as was speedily proved. To fill the place of the dead inquisitor, and to set about the stern business of avenging him, Torquemada instantly dispatched to Zaragoza Fr. Juan Colvera, Fr. Pedro de Monterubio, and Dr. Alonso de Alarcon. For the greater security of themselves and their prisoners, these delegates set up their tribunal in the royal alcazar of the Castle of Aljaferia, and proceeded to institute an active search for the culprits. Several were seized, amongst whom was Abadia’s servant, Vidal de Uranso. He was put to the question, and an admission of his own guilt extracted from him. He was tortured further in the endeavour to wring from him the names of his associates in the deed, and finally he was promised “grace” if he would divulge them.

At this price the unfortunate Gascon consented to speak, betraying all whom he had known to be in the plot and all whom he had known to sympathize with it. And Llorente, who saw the records of the proceedings, tells us that when Uranso claimed the promised grace, he was benignly answered that he should receive the grace of not having his hands hacked off—as must the others—before being hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Amongst those taken were Juan de Abadia, Juan de Esperandeu, and Luis de Santangel.

Esperandeu and Uranso suffered together at the Auto of June 30, 1486—the seventh held in Zaragoza that year. Esperandeu was dragged through the city on a hurdle, his hands were hacked off on the steps of the Cathedral, whereafter he was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Five other conspirators suffered in the same Auto, being abandoned to the secular arm and burnt alive. Two others, who had escaped, were burnt in effigy, and one of these was that Juan Pedro Sanchez who had been the leading spirit in the affair. And together with these living men and the grotesque effigies of straw arrayed in sanbenito and coroza they burnt the corpse of Juan de Abadia. He had cheated in part the Justice of the Holy Office. He had committed suicide in prison by eating a glass lamp.129

Autos succeeded one another at such a rate now in Zaragoza that no less than fourteen were held in that year 1486; 42 persons were burnt alive, 14 in effigy, and 134 were penanced in varying degrees from perpetual imprisonment to public whippings. And to the end that the publicity of these Autos might be increased and the salutary lesson inculcated by them might be as far-reaching as possible, Torquemada ordered that a fortnight before the holding of each it should be announced by public proclamation, with great solemnity and parade of mounted familiars of the Holy Office—a matter which upon this precedent became customary throughout Spain.

In his allusion to these Autos Trasmiera130 advances one of the usual sophistries employed by the Inquisition to justify its constant claim that its proceedings were dictated by mercy.

He assures us that it was a happiness (dicha) for the culprits to die so soon, and he explains that to have allowed them to live would have shown a greater rigour of justice—“as witnesseth Cain, upon whom God placed a sign ordering that none should kill him since by the prolongation of his life, his nature being what it was, he must commit more sins, and thus more surely deserve greater degrees of punishment in his eternal damnation.”

It is a priest who puts forward this blasphemous assertion that God desires the damnation of a sinner, and suggests that by burning that sinner betimes, God is to be cheated—at least in part—of His unspeakable purpose. It serves excellently to show to what desperate shifts of argument men could be urged in the attempt to justify the practices of the Holy Office.

With precisely the same degree of authority does he assure us that all the murderers died penitent—in consequence of the affectionate prayers offered up for them by Arbués in the hour of his death.

Vidal de Uranso’s confession had yielded up to the inquisitors the names not only of participators in the murder of Arbués, but of those who were believed by the Gascon to be in sympathy with the deed. By pursuing the methods peculiarly their own to cause a prosecution to spread like an oil-stain, slowly and surely covering an ever-widening area, the inquisitors were able to cause the indictment of many whose connection with the crime was of the remotest, and of others who, moved by a very Christian pity, had afforded shelter to New-Christians fleeing in terror before the blind vengeance of the Holy Office. Among the latter many were prosecuted where there was no proof that the fugitives they had sheltered were Judaizers or unfaithful. It is believed that sheer panic had driven many perfectly innocent New-Christians to depart from a city where no New-Christian might account himself secure. But in consequence of the clause introduced by the merciless Torquemada into his “Instructions,” a man’s flight was in itself a sufficient reason for the presumption of his guilt.

A reign of terror was established in Zaragoza. The tribunal of that city became one of the busiest in Spain, and it is computed that altogether some two hundred victims paid in one way and another for the death of Pedro Arbués, so that there was hardly a family, noble or simple, that was not plunged into mourning by the Justice of the Faith.

Amongst those against whom proceedings were instituted were men of the very first importance in the kingdom. One of these was that Alonso de Caballeria, Vice-Chancellor of Aragon, who had been prominent in the council summoned by Torquemada to determine the details of the introduction of the Inquisition into Aragon. Nor did they confine their attention to New-Christians. Amongst those they summoned to render to the Holy Office an account of their deeds we find no less a person than Don Jaime de Navarre, known as the Infante of Navarre or the Infante of Tudela, the son of the Queen of Navarre, and King Ferdinand’s own nephew.

A fugitive New-Christian coming to Tudela cast himself upon the mercy of the prince, and found shelter in Navarre for a few days until he could escape into France. The inquisitors, whom nothing escaped, had knowledge of this, and such was their might and arrogance that they did not hesitate to arrest the Infante in the capital of his mother’s independent kingdom. They haled this prince of the blood-royal to Zaragoza to stand his trial upon the charge of hindering the Holy Office. They cast him into prison, and subjected him to the humiliating penance of being whipped round the Metropolitan Church by two priests in the presence of his bastard cousin, the seventeen-year old Archbishop, Alfonso of Aragon. Thereafter he was made to stand penitentially, candle in hand, in view of all during High Mass, before he could earn absolution of the ecclesiastical censure he had incurred.

Alonso de Caballeria is one of the few men in history who was able successfully to defy and withstand the terrible power of that sacerdotal court.

This Vice-Chancellor was a man of great ability, the son of a wealthy baptized Hebrew nobleman, whose name had been Bonafos, but who had changed this to Caballeria upon receiving baptism, in accordance with the prevailing custom. He was arrested not only upon the charge of having given shelter to fugitives, but also upon suspicion of being, himself, a Judaizer.

Presuming upon his high position, and also upon the great esteem in which he was held by his king, Caballeria showed the Inquisition an intrepid countenance. He refused to recognize the authority of the court and of Torquemada himself, appealing to the Pope, and including in his appeal a strong complaint of the conduct of the inquisitors.

This appeal was of such a character and the man’s own position was so strong that on August 28, 1488, Innocent VIII dispatched a brief inhibiting the inquisitors from proceeding further against the Vice-Chancellor, and avocating to himself the case. But such was Torquemada’s arrogance by now that he was no longer to be intimidated by papal briefs. Under his directions the inquisitors of Zaragoza replied that the allegations contained in Caballeria’s appeal were false. The Pope, however, was insistent, and he compelled the Holy Office to bow to his will and supreme authority. On October 20 of that year the minutes of the case were forwarded to the Vatican. As a result of their perusal His Holiness must have absolved Caballeria, for not only was he delivered of the peril in which he had stood, but he continued to rise steadily in honour and consequence until he became Chief Judge and head of the Hermandad of Aragon.131

Llorente informs us132 that he perused the records of some thirty trials in connection with the Arbués affair, and that the publication of any one of them would suffice to render the Inquisition detested, were it not sufficiently detested already in all civilized countries, including Spain.

He mentions, however, two cases of interest and importance,133 to show how arbitrary was the spirit of the Inquisition, and how far-reaching its arm.

Juan Pedro Sanchez, the leader of the affair, having fled to Toulouse, was, as we have seen, sentenced as contumacious and burnt in effigy pending the seizure of his person.

In Toulouse at this time there was a student named Antonio Agustin, a member of an illustrious family of Aragon and a man destined to rise to great dignity and honour. Under the impulse of fanaticism, and acting in conjunction with several other Spaniards in Toulouse, he petitioned for the arrest of Sanchez. When this had been effected, he indited a letter to the inquisitors of Aragon, and forwarded it to his brother Pedro in Zaragoza for delivery.

Pedro, however, first discussed the matter with Guillerme Sanchez, brother of the fugitive, and three friends, and all were opposed to Agustin’s purpose. They decided not to deliver the letter, and they wrote to Agustin begging him to withdraw his plea against Sanchez and consent to the fugitive’s being restored to liberty.

Agustin was persuaded, and replied informing his brother that he had done as they had requested. Once Pedro Agustin in Zaragoza was assured of this, he delivered the letters to the inquisitors—though why he should have done so is not by any means clear. Possibly he conceived that this was the wisest course to pursue, lest it should afterwards transpire that he had suppressed such a communication. But from what follows it will be seen how ill-advised he was.

The Holy Office having received the letters, and supposing Juan Pedro Sanchez still under arrest in Toulouse, ordered him to be brought to Zaragoza. The courts of Toulouse replied that he had already been released and that his whereabouts were now unknown.

The inquisitors inquired into the matter with that terrible thoroughness of which they commanded the means. They controlled the most wonderful police system that the world has ever seen. A vast civilian army was enrolled in the service of the Holy Office, as members of the tertiary order of St. Dominic. These were the lay brothers of the family, and as the position conferred upon those who held it certain signal benefits, of which immunity from taxation was one,134 it will be understood that their number had to be limited, so very considerable were the applications for enrolment.

Originally this had been a penitential order, but very quickly it came to be known as the Militia Christi, and its members as familiars of the Holy Office—i.e. part of the family of St. Dominic. They dressed in black, and wore the white cross of St. Dominic upon their doublets and cloaks, and they were made to join the Confraternity of St. Peter Martyr. The inquisitors seldom went abroad without an escort of these armed lay-brothers.

In the ranks of the Militia Christi were to be found men of all professions, dignities, and callings. They formed the secret police of the Inquisition, they were the eyes and ears of the Holy Office, ubiquitous in every stratum of social life.

Through these agents the inquisitors were not long in ascertaining what had taken place in the matter of Juan Pedro Sanchez, and soon the five friends were under arrest and forced to answer the serious charge of hindering the Holy Office.

They were paraded in public in the Auto of May 6, 1487, as suspects—leviter—of Judaizing; they were penanced to stand in full view of the people, candle in hand and wearing the sanbenito, during Mass, and they were thereafter disqualified from holding any office or benefice or pursuing any honourable profession during the good pleasure of the inquisitors.

As it was, they escaped lightly. That they were suspected leviter of Judaizing, shows us how easily that suspicion might be incurred. It was purely constructive in this instance—an inference to be drawn from the fact that they had befriended a Judaizer who was under sentence.

The other case is far more horrible. It shows in operation Torquemada’s decree regarding the children of heretics, and reveals in the fullest measure its appalling inhumanity.

Another who had fled to Toulouse, fearing implication in the affair of the murder of Arbués, was one Gaspar de Santa Cruz. It happened that he died there, after having been sentenced as contumacious and burnt in effigy at Zaragoza. It came to the ears of the inquisitors that he had been assisted in his flight by his son; and not content with the heavy punishment of infamy that must fall automatically upon that son for sins that were not his own, not content with having reduced him to destitution by confiscating his inheritance and by disqualifying him from office, benefice, or honourable employment, they now seized his person and indicted him for hindering.

Arrayed in a yellow sanbenito, this son, who had discharged by his father the sacrosanct duty which nature and humanity impose, was exhibited to scorn in an Auto, and further penanced by being compelled to come before the court of the Holy Office and testify to his father’s contumacious flight. Nor did that ghoulish tribunal count itself satisfied even then. It was further imposed upon him that he must repair to Toulouse, exhume his father’s remains, and publicly burn them, returning to Zaragoza with a properly attested report of the performance, when he should receive absolution of the censures incurred.

Santa Cruz carried out that barbarous command, as the only means of saving his liberty and perhaps his life. For it is certain that had he refused, it would have been argued that he had rejected the offered means of reconciliation with the Church he had so grievously offended, and he would have been prosecuted as impenitent; whilst had he availed himself of the only alternative and fled, he must have been sentenced as contumacious and would have gone to the stake if he were ever taken.

From the hour of his death Pedro Arbués de Epila was looked upon as a saint and martyr, the notion being carefully fostered by the members of his order in the minds of the faithful.

And, as is usual in such cases, miraculous manifestations of his sanctity are alleged to have begun in the very hour of his death. Trasmiera tells us that the bells rang of themselves when he died, and he opines that this serves to approve their use in a time when Luther and others were condemning them as vain.

The blood of the inquisitor, we learn from the same source, boiled upon the stones of the church where it had fallen, and continued to do so for a fortnight afterwards; whilst on any of the twelve days immediately following the night of his murder, a handkerchief pressed to the stones upon which his blood had been shed, when removed, was found to be blood-stained.

These, says Trasmiera, were miracles of which all were witnesses. There is much more of the same kind—including an account of the inquisitor’s apparitions after death, as testified by Mosen Blanco, to whom the ghost appeared, and with whom it conversed at length—to be found in Trasmiera’s “Vida y Muerte del Venerable Inquisidor, Pedro Arbués.”

The sword with which he was slain was preserved in the Metropolitan Church of Zaragoza, a relic sanctified by the blood that had embrued it.

He was buried in the same church, and on the spot where he fell Isabella raised a beautiful monument to his memory in 1487. Part of its inscription ran: “Happy Zaragoza! Rejoice that here is buried he who is the glory of the martyrs.”

He was beatified two hundred years later by Alexander VII, largely in consequence of the efforts of the Spanish inquisitors, who perceived what an added prestige it would give their order if one of its members were worshipped as a martyr. His canonization followed in the nineteenth century. It was effected by Pope Pius IX, and was the subject of much derisory comment in the Rome of that day, which had just broken the shackles of clerical government that had trammelled it for some fifteen hundred years.

CHAPTER XV
TORQUEMADA’S FURTHER “INSTRUCTIONS”

The intrepid but ineffectual resistance offered by Zaragoza to the Inquisition was emulated by the principal cities of Aragon; one and all protested against the institution of this tribunal under the new form which Torquemada had given it.

But nowhere was resistance of the least avail against the iron purpose of the Grand Inquisitor, armed with the entire force of civil justice to constrain the people into submission to the ecclesiastical will.

Teruel had been thrown into open revolt by the proposal to appoint inquisitors there; and so fierce and determined was the armed resistance, that not until the King’s troops made their appearance in the streets of that city, in March 1485, were order and obedience restored.

In Valencia, too, there was a vigorous opposition led by the nobles, and throughout Cataluña the resistance was so resolute that it was not until two years later that the Sovereigns were able to reduce the people to submission.

Barcelona urged an ancient right to appoint her own inquisitors, and refused persistently and angrily to recognize the authority of Torquemada or his delegates, in spite of any bulls that might have been issued by Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII. Nor was this city’s obstinacy conquered until 1487, after Pope Innocent had issued his second bull, confirming Torquemada in the office of Grand Inquisitor of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Valencia, and further extending his jurisdiction so that it included all the Spains—in which bull he formally cancelled the ancient rights of Barcelona to appoint her own inquisitors.

It should be sufficiently clear from this that, notwithstanding the racial antipathy between Spaniard and Jew, notwithstanding the religious spirit so very ardent in the people of Spain, serving to aggravate beyond all reason that hatred of the Israelite, the Inquisition—as Torquemada understood and controlled it—was very far from being desired by them. That this grim institution should have contrived so firmly to establish itself upon Spanish soil and to wield there a power such as it wielded in no other Catholic country of Europe, was due entirely to the brothers of St. Dominic and the fanaticism of Torquemada playing upon the bigotry and acquisitiveness of the Sovereigns.

Assailants of the Roman Church have urged that the Inquisition was a religious institution. Defenders of that same Church, in their endeavour to shift so terrible a burden from her shoulders, have sought to show that the Inquisition was a political machine. It was neither, and at the same time it was both. But chiefly and primarily it was just a clerical weapon. And clericalism in the Iberian Peninsula, pervaded by the spirit of Torquemada, converted that institution into an instrument far more dreadful and oppressive than was its character in Italy, or France, or any other Roman Catholic country of the world in which the Holy Office held jurisdiction.

In Spain it had set up in the evening of the fifteenth century an absolute reign of terror, depriving men of all liberty of conscience and of speech and spreading a network of espionage over the face of the land.

And in the meantime, practice having brought to light certain shortcomings in the decrees which he had already issued, Torquemada added a further eleven articles in 1485. In the main, however, these are concerned with the internal affairs of the Holy Office rather than with its attitude towards offenders.

Articles I and II provide for the payment of officers of the Inquisition, and decree that no officer shall receive gifts of any nature under pain of instant dismissal.

Article III disposes that the inquisitors shall keep a permanent agent in Rome, who shall be skilled in the law, so that he may attend to matters appertaining to the Holy Office.

From this it is to be inferred that appeals to the Vatican continued to be numerous, notwithstanding the provisions made by the Pope to constitute Torquemada the supreme arbiter in matters of the Faith.

Articles V to XI are entirely concerned with details relating to confiscations. These would be of no particular interest, but that they serve to show how vast by now was the business of confiscation, since the manner of conducting it and disposing of confiscated property should demand so many decrees to govern it.

Article IV is the only one that may be said to concern the actual jurisprudence of the Holy Office. This is intended not so much to soften the rigour as to remove the inconveniences that might arise out of Article X of the “Instructions” of 1484.

By that article it was decreed that confiscation should be retrospective—i.e. that a heretic’s property should be confiscate not from the day of the discovery of his heresy, but from the date of the offence itself. So that any property that might in the meantime have been alienated—whether in the ordinary way of commerce or otherwise—must be considered as the property of the Holy Office, and was to be seized by the Holy Office, no matter into whose hands it might meanwhile have passed.

Such a decree, as will be seen, was proving a serious hindrance to trade; for it became unsafe to purchase anything from any one, since should either party to the transaction subsequently be discovered to have fallen into the sin of heresy prior to that transaction, the other would be stripped of the acquired property, and might be subjected to the entire loss. Moreover, as proceedings were taken against the dead, and as there was no limit imposed upon the retrospection allowed to inquisitors, no man could account himself safe from confiscations incurred through the sin of some other from whom he or his forbears had acquired the property.

The vagueness of this article urgently demanded amending, and this was the purpose of Article IV of the “Instructions” of 1485. It decreed that all contracts concluded before 1479 should be accounted valid, although it might come to be discovered against either of the contracting parties that he was guilty of heresy at the time of such contract.

This is the only instance in which we find Torquemada promulgating a decree to soften the rigour of any previous enactment, and it is very clear that it is a decree dictated not by clemency but by expediency.

In the event of fraud, or of any one being a party to a fraud to abuse the privilege conferred by this article, Torquemada provided that the offender, if reconciled, should receive a hundred lashes and be branded on the face with a hot iron; whilst, if not reconciled—even though he should be a good Catholic—he must suffer confiscation of all his property.135

To justify the punishment of branding on the face, the case of Cain is urged as a proper precedent, and so modern a historian as Garcia Rodrigo does not hesitate to put this seriously forward.136

Three years later—in 1488—Torquemada found it necessary to add a further fifteen articles to his “Instructions,” and we may anticipate a little by briefly surveying their provisions at this stage.

Complaints to Rome of the injustices and the excessive rigour of the inquisitors—a constant feature of Torquemada’s Grand-Inquisitorship—had by that time become so numerous that the Pope found it necessary to order Torquemada to re-edit what Amador de los Rios very aptly terms his “Code of Terror.”137

The chief ground of these complaints had concerned the delays that so commonly occurred in bringing an accused to trial. When a prisoner’s acquittal ultimately chanced to take place, it was after a long term of imprisonment for which there was no compensation or redress; and when the person so treated was a man of position and influence, it is natural that he would protest strongly against the treatment to which he had been subjected before it was discovered that no charge could be sustained against him. The real reason of these delays must not be supposed to lie in dilatoriness or sluggishness on the part of the inquisitors. Indeed, the excessive dispatch with which they conducted the affairs of their tribunal is a matter to the scandal of which Llorente draws attention more than once—and particularly in the course of chronicling the fact that in the year of its introduction into Toledo this court dealt—as we shall see—with no less than some 3,300 cases, 27 of the accused being burnt and the remainder penanced in various degrees. He protests with reason that it is utterly impossible that at such a rate of procedure evidence can properly have been sifted and any sort of justice done.

Where delays took place they were the result of the extreme reluctance on the part of the Holy Office to allow any to go free upon whom its talons had once fastened. Thus, when even the slight degree or evidence necessary to enable the inquisitors to convict was lacking, they would delay in the daily hope that such evidence might be forthcoming, and by repeated examinations they would meanwhile seek to force the unfortunate prisoner into contradictions that should justify them in resorting to torture.

In view of the explicit pontifical command, Torquemada was compelled to amend this state of things, at least in theory, by decreeing (Article III) that there should be no delays in proceeding to trial through lack of proof. Where proof was lacking, the accused should at once be restored to liberty, since he could at any time—when fresh proof was forthcoming—be rearrested.

Similarly, with a view of expediting trials, he ordered (Article IV) that since in all the courts of the Inquisition there were not the necessary lawyers, henceforth, when a case was completed, the dossier of the proceedings should be sent to the Grand Inquisitor himself, and he would then submit it to the lawyers of the Suprema, who would advise upon it.

But he amply made up for what softening of rigour might be contained in these articles by the greater severity enjoined in some of the other decrees which he embodied in these “Instructions” of 1488.

Finding that the inquisitors of Aragon had been departing from certain of his enactments of 1484, diluting them with the weaker rules that had obtained under the old Inquisition in that kingdom, he commanded that all inquisitors should proceed in strict obedience to the statutes contained in the past “Instructions.”

He provided (Article V) that the inquisitors should themselves visit the prisons once in every fortnight, but that no outsiders should be permitted to communicate with the prisoners, save of course the priests who would go to comfort them. To the end that a still greater secrecy should be observed in the trials, he commanded (Article VI) that when the depositions of the witnesses were being taken none should be present other than those who were by law absolutely necessary; and he enjoined (Article VII) the safe and secret custody of all documents relating to the cases tried.

We are left to gather that the harshness of his enactment concerning the children of heretics had been tempered a little by a natural humane pity which did not at all commend itself to the pitiless Grand Inquisitor; for we now find him (Article XI) enjoining inquisitors to take care that the decree forbidding those unfortunates the use of gold and silver and fine garments, and disqualifying them from honourable employment, should be rigorously enforced.

He provided (Article XIII) that all the expenses of the Holy Office—which must have been enormous by now, considering to what vast proportions he had developed that organization—should be defrayed out of confiscated property before this was surrendered to the Royal treasury; and further (Article XV), that all appointed notaries, fiscals, and constables should discharge their functions in person and not by deputy.

The most interesting of these statutes of 1488, in consequence of the information it conveys on the subject of the activities of the Inquisition and the enormous scale of the prosecutions upon which it was engaged, is contained in Article XIV. The prisons of Spain were becoming so crowded, and the expense of maintaining the prisoners was imposing so heavy a tax upon the Holy Office, that it had become urgently necessary to make some fresh provision that would relieve this burden. Therefore, as this article sets forth, Torquemada enjoined the Sovereigns to order the building in every district of the Inquisition of a quadrangular enclosure of small houses (casillas) for the residence of those sentenced to the penance of imprisonment. These houses were to be so contrived that the penitents might pursue in them their business or trade and earn their own livelihood, thus relieving the Inquisition of the heavy expense of supporting them. Each of these quadrangular penitentiaries—for this is the origin of the term—was to be equipped with its own chapel.138