As to Ximenez' much criticised attitude toward the Moors, it was at one with its age. To reproach him with it is as unreasonable as to condemn Marcus Aurelius for having persecuted the Christians, or George Washington for having silently accepted negro slavery. A man, no matter how great his character, is limited somewhere by the standards of his period. The fifteenth century was far from being radical in the privileges it extended to free opinion. Even some generations later we find, in the Palatinate, when the Elector Frederick III turned from Lutheranism to Calvinism, in 1563, he forced all his subjects under pain of banishment, to turn with him. Within a few years his son changed them back to Lutheranism, only to have them, under the next ruler, constrained with severe punishments to again accept the Heidelberg catechism. The religious history of most of the states of Europe prove that the same theory was held: "cujus regio, ejus religio." Ximenez can plead more excuse for his attitude since in Spain was the problem of the more radical difference of Christianity and Islam. He felt, and the constant later revolts somewhat justified the idea, that a newly conquered people is not likely to remain loyal, when they are bound together against their ruler in an antagonistic creed. So he went to Granada in 1499 to labor for the conversion of the people.
At first he used much the same methods that prevail to-day in some of our cities, what we may call the soup-kitchen missionary system to evangelize the emigrant. Ximenez instructed the Mohammedan in doctrine, and he also gave presents to impress the oriental mind. So effectively did the method work that immense numbers of citizens embraced the faith. On one day four thousand were baptized. So far the treaty of the Conquest was not violated, since the conversions were voluntary. When, however, there was a revolt of those Moors who were angered by seeing the rapid spread of Christianity, harsher methods than persuasion were resorted to. The letter of the treaty was kept but its spirit, that reflected Isabella's magnanimous tolerance, was stretched indeed. The first uprising turned to open rebellion, and when this was put down, the majority of the citizens let themselves be baptized to avoid exile and confiscation. Though the two great prelates, the gentle Talavera and the indomitable Ximenez, burning with zeal, went about the city catechising and instructing the poorest, there were many thousands of Mohammedans who hated the religion to which outwardly they conformed. A child to-day can understand the futility of such conversions. No one denies that Ximenez was stern. He who loved learning with the passionate devotion of a Bede or an Erasmus, (we all know the remark of Francis I when confined at Alcalá, "one Spanish monk has done what it would take a line of kings in France to accomplish"), this same humanist scholar burned in public bonfire the Moslem books, only reserving the medical ones for Alcalá: surely this is proof of his grim sincerity.
When Isabella died, Ximenez took Ferdinand's side against his impertinent Austrian son-in-law. Philip I did not live long enough to involve Spain in an internecine war, her curse for ages; and it was the great statesman's hold on the government, at the time of the young king's sudden death, that saved the country from a revolution. Ferdinand had the man to whom he owed Castile, created a Cardinal, and he also appointed him Grand-Inquisitor.
Many hold the erroneous opinion that Ximenez was one of the founders of the Holy Office in Spain. It was established ten years before he came to court as Isabella's confessor, and it was only now, in his sixty-first year that he had control in it. True to his reforming character he set about changing what abuses had crept in. He fostered the better religious instruction of the newly converted; and he prosecuted the inquisitor Lucero, who had been guilty of injustice.
The great Cardinal-Archbishop was over threescore and ten when he undertook the expedition to Northern Africa. He had long burned to plant the Church again where it had flourished under St. Cyprian and St. Augustine. As the pirates of Oran were a terror in the Mediterranean, it was against that city he set out in the year 1509. His address to the troops before the battle, encouraging them against an enemy who had ravaged their coasts, dragged their children into slavery, and insulted the Christian name, roused the men to an heroic charge up the hill of Oran with Spain's battle cry Santiago! on their lips. Of the vast treasure found in the city, Ximenez who had spent a fortune to fit out the expedition, only reserved the Moslem books for his University of Alcalá. For it must not be forgotten that in the midst of state questions, this remarkable man was carrying on the building and endowing of an University to whose halls the learned minds of Spain and Europe were invited. He was printing at his own expense the well-known Polyglot Bible, the first edition in their original texts of the Christian Scriptures. From his early years a close student of the Bible, he had learned Chaldaic and Hebrew for its better study; every day on his knees he read a chapter of the Holy Word. Besides these interests he found time to build various hospitals, libraries, and churches, to organize summer retreats for the health of his professors, to print and distribute free works on agriculture, to give dowries to distressed women, to visit the sick in person, and to feed daily thirty poor in his palace.
Ferdinand, a good ruler, but suspicious and ungrateful, never had much love for the Cardinal. Yet on his deathbed he left him Regent of Castile, saying that a better leader on account of his virtues and love of justice could not be found to reëstablish order and morality, and only wishing he were a little more pliable. Some idea of Ximenez' genius may be gathered from a hasty review of his Regency, which covered the last two years of his life. It stands an astonishing feat of noble activity. He brought order into the finances and paid the crown debts. He introduced the militia system into the army, proving that men fight better when they defend their own homes. He strengthened the navy to help break the Moorish pirate Barbarossa who controlled the sea. He restored the dockyards of Seville. He crushed a French invasion in Navarre, and put down local disorders in Málaga and other places, for the nobles took this opportunity to again assert themselves. He adjusted troubles with both the ex-queens, Juana la Loca and Germaine de Foix. It was just four months before his death that the Polyglot Bible was finished. When the young son of the printer, dressed in his best attire, ran with the last sheets to the Cardinal, Ximenez exclaimed fervently: "I thank thee, O most high God, that thou hast brought this work to its longed-for end!" To-day the more scientific methods of philology have put the Complutensian Polyglot in the shade, but none deny that for its period it was a notable work.
Another of Ximenez' reforms, little known, was his advocacy of Las Casas in the crusade against Indian slavery in the American colonies. As early as 1511, a Dominican preacher named Montesino gave a sermon in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, before the governor Diego Columbus, in which he thundered against the ill-treatment of the natives. The monks were threatened with expulsion by the rich settlers unless Montesino retracted, whereupon on the following Sunday, the brave reformer not only repeated his previous attack but added fresh proofs. Against fierce opposition the Dominicans refused the sacraments to every one who owned an Indian slave. But they could not end the evil, so the passionate Las Casas, whose whole life may be said to have burned with fury for this cause, returned to Spain to plead for the Indians.
The Regent took up the question with interest, and the commission which he organized and sent out to the Colonies is a model of reforming government worthy of study. Just as it was about to start, fourteen pious Franciscans came down to Spain to offer themselves for the good work. Among them was a brother of the King of Scotland,—a rather delightful episode of the cosmopolitanism of religion. Ximenez also issued a proclamation forbidding the importation of negro slaves, for the colonists had already learned that one negro did the work of four Indians. Should not this act of farseeing wisdom, be set against his stern treatment of the Moors?
Ximenez ruled as Regent of Castile from the time of Ferdinand's death to the coming of Charles V to his distant possessions. The Cardinal-Archbishop, alert in mind and body though over eighty, was on his way to meet the young Emperor on his landing in the north, when he died suddenly at Roa, in the province of Burgos. He was buried in his loved Alcalá, and his tomb still rests in the dismantled town whose University has been removed to Madrid. Just thirty years after the Cardinal's death, one of the world's supreme geniuses was born under the shadow of his University, as if a compensating Providence would reward the Franciscan friar's unresting love of letters. Ximenez has received scant justice, but if the atmosphere of culture which he created at Alcalá, had aught to do with making Cervantes what he was, the stern educator did not live in vain.
In Toledo it takes no effort of the imagination to people the streets with the figures of the past; it is every-day life that drops away, and the surprise is that one does not meet some intellectual-faced cardinal, some hidalgo in velvet cloak or chased armor. The stone effigies on the tombs of Spanish churches make it easy to picture a certain very splendid presence that once walked, in youth's proud livery, these silent streets. Garcilaso de la Vega is a pure type of the grandee, Spain's Philip Sidney, a courtier, a soldier, a poet whose gift of song made him the idol of the nation, he is one of the alluring figures of history. By writing in Virgilian classic verse, he changed the rhythm of Spanish poetry from that of the "Cid," of Juan de Mena and Manrique. "In our Spain, Garcilaso stands first beyond compare," wrote a contemporary poet, a judgment held later by Cervantes and Lope de Vega.