It is difficult to ascertain exactly how many heretics were burned during his term of office; some historians placing the number at more than 8000, and others at 2000, while 90,000 are declared to have been subject to various forms of penance. Whatever the exact statistics, they represent but a small section of the results of the Inquisition during these years. Men die and are forgotten but the suspicion and treachery that are born of terror, the spirit of pitiless fanaticism that springs from licensed intolerance, the intellect bowed into subservience to an iron yoke of uniformity,—these were to leave their mark for generations and lessen the force of progress that Ferdinand and Isabel fostered so strongly in other directions.
CHAPTER IX
THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS AND MUDEJARES
The Inquisition, which made life impossible for Spanish heretics, had no direct power over unbaptized Jews, since it could not convict them of apostasy in connection with a faith they had never professed. Some of their race, indeed, were summoned before the Holy Office, accused of subverting Christian neighbours to Judaism; but their pronounced reluctance to share the privileges of their religion with Gentiles prevented any widespread application of this charge.
Nevertheless it was obvious that in a land where their converted brethren had been subject to torture, imprisonment, and death, they themselves could not long hope to escape the fury of popular fanaticism. Their wealth and their pride aroused envy and dislike so violent that their very qualities and virtues appeared to Spanish prejudice as though born of malignant design. The Curate of Los Palacios, enumerating the posts of responsibility and the openings in the skilled labour-market to which their talents and industry gave them access, declared that “they sought only comfortable berths, where they could gain much money with little toil”; as if the work of merchant, land-agent, weaver, tailor, or silversmith, demanded less capacity than tilling the soil or laying bricks.
Similarly, their unsurpassed knowledge of medicine and skill in surgery were proclaimed, about the middle of the fifteenth century, by a Franciscan friar of high reputation, to have been acquired solely from a desire to harm their Christian neighbours. It was a suggestion to which the close connection at that time between medicine, astrology, and the black arts, lent some colour.
In 1480, Ferdinand and Isabel forbade Christian patients to be attended by Jews; but it is significant that some years later the Spanish Dominicans petitioned for a dispensation from this decree, on the plea that doctors of their own creed were almost impossible to find. It was to a Jew also that John II. of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, had turned for advice, when overcome by blindness in his old age; with the result that this physician successfully performed a double operation for cataract.
Of all the professions and employments, however, to which the unpopularity of the Jew may be traced, it was the office of money-lender that most earned for him the hatred and suspicion of his fellow citizens. The Church had from very early days condemned any lending of money at interest as a form of usury; but since it was impossible to carry on business or trade on a large scale without borrowed capital, Christian financiers as well as needy spendthrifts were driven to have recourse to a people, whose moral code permitted them to effect the loan at a profit.
“That cunning race,” says the Curate of Los Palacios, “who battened on usury exacted from the Christians, and of whom many, poor but a short time before, became speedily rich.” Scarcity of coinage, the lack of certain security for their bonds, and the secret favour they enjoyed with many of the Spanish sovereigns, who, besides borrowing from them, reaped a large revenue from the Jewish poll-tax, account for the high rate of interest that they usually charged. At the beginning of the fifteenth century this has been reckoned as from twenty per cent. in Castile to thirty per cent. in Aragon.
The enactment that Jewish doctors should not attend Christians is typical of the attitude of Ferdinand and Isabel towards this subject race. Toleration and protection on a limited basis were at first a matter of necessity, both on political and financial grounds; but the lines of separation and segregation were tightened, and the “Ghetto” of the Spanish Israelite became an unfortified camp, whose enemies only awaited a favourable opportunity to sound the attack that would leave it a ruin.
So long as the Moorish war lasted, Jewish taxes and Jewish financiers contributed too largely to the expenditure and organization of the various campaigns, for their supply and safety to be endangered; but the conquest of the Infidel rang the knell of the Hebrew unbeliever. The sovereigns’ hands were free; the Crescent lay trampled on the battlefields of Granada; and the sword that had been suspended for so many years over the Juderías at length fell.