[1] Southey, "Roder.," i. p. 235, note.
[2] Prescott, "Ferd. and Isab.," pp. 134, 135.
[3] Al Makk., i. 116.
At the end of the fourteenth century the people rose against them, and 15,000 Jews were massacred in different parts of Spain. Many were nominally converted, and 35,000 conversions were put to the credit of a single saint. These new Christians sometimes attained high ecclesiastical dignities, and intermarried with the noble families—the taint of which "mala sangre" came afterwards to be regarded with the greatest horror and aversion.
It was against the converted Jews that the Inquisition was first established, and they chiefly suffered under it at first. In 1492, on the final extinction of the Arab dominion in Spain, a very large number of Jews were expelled from Castile,[1] the evil example being afterwards followed in other parts of Spain. The story of the treatment of Jews by Christians is indeed one of the darkest in the history of Christianity.
[1] Variously estimated at 160,000 or 800,000.
[B.]
SPAIN AND THE PAPAL POWER.
Perhaps no part of the history of Spain affords so interesting a study as the consideration of those gradual steps by which, from being one of the most independent of Churches, she has become the most subservient, and therefore the most degraded, of all. The question of how this was brought about, apart from its intrinsic interest as illustrating the development of a great nation, is well worth investigating, from the momentous influence which it has had upon the religious history of the world at large. For it is not too much to say that Rome could never have made good its ascendency, spiritual no less than temporal, over so large a part of mankind, had not the material resources and the blind devotion of Spain been ready to back the haughty pretensions and unscrupulous ability of the Italian pontiffs.