Yet the Spaniards, I say, were bad enough. The cruelties following the capitulation of Málaga, in 1487, were more befitting fiends than a man and woman who prided themselves in the title of Catholic king and queen.
Since the establishment of the Inquisition, religious persecutions had become but too gratifying to the national taste. On this occasion at Málaga, the apostate Moors were first caught and burned. Twelve apostate Christians were then fastened to stakes in an open place and made the barbarous sport of Spanish cavaliers, who, mounted on fleet horses, hurled at their naked bodies pointed reeds while rushing past at full speed. This was continued until the torn and bleeding flesh of their victims was filled with darts, and the wretched sufferers expired under the most excruciating torments. Then, of the rest of the Moorish prisoners, three divisions were made; one for the redemption of Christian captives, one to be distributed among the victors as slaves, and one to be publicly sold into slavery.
Spanish knights returned from their incursions against the Moors with strings of turbaned heads hanging from their saddle-bows, which, as they passed along, they threw to the boys in the streets, in order to inspire their youthful minds with hatred to the foes of their religion.
From making slaves of prisoners of war, a traffic in human flesh springs up. A slave-trade association was formed in Portugal in 1443. Gonzalez brought slaves to Seville; Columbus sent to Spain a cargo of Indian slaves in 1495; in 1503 the enslavement of American Indians was authorized by Ferdinand and Isabella; and in 1508 the African slave-trade unfolded in all its hideous barbarity. The slave-trade, however, was tolerated by these sovereigns from mistaken kindness, rather than from cruelty. It was to shield the Indian, who died under the infliction of labor, that Isabella permitted the importation of Africans into the colonies.
CIVILIZED TORTURES.
Cruelty was a prominent wheel in the machinery of government, as well as in religious discipline. Torture was deemed inseparable from justice, either as preparatory to trial to elicit a confession of guilt, or as part of an execution to increase the punishment. Hippolite de Marsilli, a learned jurisconsult of Bologna, mentioned fourteen ways of inflicting torture, which are given by Lacroix. Among them were compressing the limbs with instruments or cords; the injection of water, vinegar, or oil; application of hot pitch; starvation; placing hot eggs under the armpits; introducing dice under the skin; tying lighted candles to the fingers which were consumed with the wax, and dropping water from a great height upon the stomach. Josse Damhoudere mentioned thirteen modes of execution or punishment—fire, the sword, mechanical force, quartering, the wheel, the fork, the gibbet, dragging, spiking, cutting off the ears, dismembering, hogging, and the pillory. Every country had its peculiar system of torture.
In 1547 English vagrants were branded with a V and enslaved for two years. Should the unfortunate attempt escape, a hot S was burned into the flesh and he was a slave for life. A second attempted escape was death. In those days wife-whipping was a common and respectable domestic discipline; culprits in the pillory and stocks were stationed in the marketplace where all the people might strike them; prisoners were stripped of their clothes, confined in filthy dungeons half filled with stagnant water, and there not unfrequently left to starve, while slimy reptiles crawled over the naked body, or drove their poisonous fangs into the quivering flesh.
The sports of the Spaniards we now regard as cruel, as ours will be regarded four hundred years hence. Although delighting in games, in pantomimic dance, in fencing, wrestling, running, leaping, hunting, hawking, with the gentler pastime of song and guitar, the more popular amusements were cock-fights, dog and bull fights, bull and bear fights, bear and dog fights, enjoyed alike by high and low, by women, boys, and men, by laity and clergy. Sometimes fighters would enter the arena blindfolded and engage in deadly encounter. Yet how much more cruel were these sports than modern horse-racing, cock-fighting, dog-fighting, prize-fighting, rope-walking, lion-taming, steeple-chases, to say nothing of the more gentlemanly cruelty of raising foxes to be hunted, and worried, and finally torn in pieces by dogs, let posterity judge. I do not say that the sixteenth-century sports of Spain were not more cruel than the English sports of to-day. I think they were. But that Spaniards were inherently more cruel, that is to say, that their hearts were more wickedly wanton, their sympathies more inhumane, or that they enjoyed a more ardent pleasure in inflicting pain upon others than men do now, I do not believe. The Spaniards were a nation of soldiers, and soldiers are necessarily cruel. Men go to war to hurt the enemy, not to be kind to him. Unquestionably the effect of bull-fights, like the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome, was debasing, tending to excite a love of the bloody and terrible, and to render insipid tamer and more refined amusements. This to them was a misfortune, although the repulsive sport did foster a spirit of courage and endurance.
The corrida de toros, bull-run, or bull-fight, the national sport of Spain, is a relic of Moorish chivalry, yet no less Spanish than Arabic; for the institution as it exists in Spain is found neither in Africa nor in Arabia. Originally, as in the ancient tournament, in the sport engaged only cavaliers, or gentlemen, in whom were combined such skill and strength that the head of a bull was sometimes stricken off by a single blow of the montante. Since which time the tournament has degenerated into a prize-ring, and the chivalrous bull-fight which in principle was a display of courage combined with skill in horsemanship, and in the use of the lance, has become a sort of dramatic shambles, where the actors are low-born and mercenary professionals.
SPANISH DOMESTIC LIFE.