TORQUEMADA’S WORK AS INQUISITOR (A.D. 1483).
Torquemada, while at the head of the Inquisition in Spain, is said to have convicted about six thousand persons annually. The Roman See during his ministration made a painful traffic by the sale of dispensations, which those rich enough were willing to obtain. This monster, the author of incalculable miseries, was permitted to reach a very old age and to die quietly in his bed. Yet he lived in such constant apprehension of assassination that he is said to have kept a reputed unicorn’s horn always on his table, which was imagined to have the power of detecting and neutralising poisons, while for the more complete protection of his person he was allowed an escort of fifty horse and two hundred foot in his progresses through the kingdom. Prescott says that this man’s zeal was of such an extravagant character that it may almost shelter itself under the name of insanity. He waged war on freedom of thought in every form. In 1490 he caused several Hebrew Bibles to be publicly burnt, and some time after more than six thousand volumes of Oriental learning, on the imputation of Judaism, sorcery, or heresy, at the autos-da-fé of Salamanca, the very nursery of science.
AN “AUTO-DA-FÉ” IN SPAIN (A.D. 1483).
The last scene in the dismal tragedy of a so-called trial before the Inquisition, says Prescott, was the Act of Faith (auto-da-fé)—the most imposing spectacle, probably, which has been witnessed since the ancient Roman triumph, and which was intended, somewhat profanely, to represent the terrors of the Day of Judgment. The proudest grandees of the land, on this occasion, putting on the sable livery of familiars of the Holy Office and bearing aloft its banners, condescended to act as the escort of the ministers, while the ceremony was not unfrequently countenanced by the royal presence. It should be stated, however, that neither of these acts of condescension, or more properly humiliation, was witnessed until a period posterior to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. The effect was further heightened by the concourse of ecclesiastics in their sacerdotal robes, and the pompous ceremonial which the Church of Rome knows so well how to display on fitting occasions, and which was intended to consecrate, as it were, this bloody sacrifice. The most important actors in the scene were the unfortunate convicts, disgorged for the first time from the dungeons of the tribunal.
ASSASSINATION OF A SPANISH INQUISITOR (A.D. 1486).
When Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1486, introduced the Inquisition into Arragon, the higher orders and the Cortes were greatly opposed to it, and sent a deputation to the Court of Rome and to Ferdinand to suspend an institution so hateful and oppressive. Both Pope and King paid no regard to the remonstrance. The Arragonese thereupon, in self-defence, formed a conspiracy for the assassination of Arbues, and subscribed a large sum to defray the expenses. Arbues, being conscious of his unpopularity, wore under his monastic robes a suit of mail and a helmet under his hood, and his sleeping apartment was well guarded. But the conspirators managed to surprise him while at his devotions. Near midnight Arbues was on his knees before the great altar of the cathedral at Saragossa. They suddenly surrounded him; one of them wounded him in the arm with a dagger, while another dealt a fatal blow in the back of his neck. The priests, who were preparing to celebrate matins in the choir, hastened to the spot, but too late. They carried the bleeding body of the inquisitor to his apartment, but he survived only two days, and it is said he blessed the Lord that he had been permitted to seal so good a cause with his blood. This murder was soon avenged, and the bloodhounds of the tribunal tracked the murderers, after hundreds of victims were sacrificed, cut off their right hands, and hanged them; and Arbues was even honoured as a martyr, and after two centuries was, in 1664, canonised as a saint.
CARDINAL XIMENES AND QUEEN ISABELLA (A.D. 1495).
Cardinal Ximenes, who had acquired great reputation for the austere life he had led, was appointed confessor to Queen Isabella in 1492, and in 1495 was appointed by her Archbishop of Toledo. He maintained all his austerities in the new situation. Under his robes of silk or fur he wore the coarse frock of St. Francis, which he used to mend with his own hands. He used no linen about his person or his bed, and slept on a miserable pallet, which was concealed under a luxurious couch. He was a rigorous reformer of the monkish fraternities, and this excited violent complaints. The general of the Franciscans, full of rage, demanded an audience of the Queen; and when challenged by her for his rudeness and for forgetting to whom he was speaking, he petulantly replied, “Yes; I know well whom I am speaking to—the Queen of Castile, a mere handful of dust, like myself!” The Queen was not moved by this insolence, but supported Ximenes in his trenchant reforms. Ximenes vehemently urged the King and Queen in 1499 to extirpate the Mohammedan religion, and he did not scruple to bribe the Moors to accept baptism, and it was said he baptised three thousand in one day. In 1502 he procured a decree enforcing baptism or exile on all Moors above fourteen. Ximenes founded the University of Alcala, which was opened in 1508. He also carried out a scheme for publishing a Bible, being the first successful attempt at a polyglot version of the Scriptures. This took fifteen years to prepare, and it was completed in 1517. Charles V. wrote a cold-blooded letter, dispensing with Ximenes’s services, and it so excited the cardinal that he was seized with fever and died at the age of eighty-one.
SOME SO-CALLED IRREPRESSIBLE HERETICS (A.D. 1080).
Among all the sects of the Middle Ages, by far the most important in numbers and radical antagonism to the Church were the Cathari or the Pure, as with characteristic sectarian satisfaction they styled themselves. Albigenses they were called in Languedoc, Patarenes in North Italy, Good Men by themselves. Stretching through Central Europe to Thrace and Bulgaria, they joined hands with the Paulicians of the East, and shared in their views, which have been variously represented, and were somewhat mystical. It is difficult to understand the mighty attraction which these doctrines—partly Gnostic, partly Manichean—exercised for so long a time on the minds and hearts of many. Baxter’s estimate of the Albigenses was—Manichees with some better persons mixed. First attracting notice in the latter half of the eleventh century, the Cathari multiplied with extraordinary rapidity, so that in many districts they were during the next century more numerous than the Catholics. St. Bernard, who undertook a mission among them in 1147, describes the churches of the Catholics as without people, and the people without priests. The Cathari disappeared at the close of the thirteenth century, and then the Beghards and Beguins become prominent, who were pietists associated for works of Christian beneficence. Then some extreme Franciscans were mixed up with them, and called themselves Zealots, or Little Brethren, or Spirituals. These remonstrants drifted by degrees into open antagonists of the Church, and talked of the Pope as the mystical antichrist. Other less commendable mediæval sects were the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit. About this time all countries were hotbeds of various sects. Pope Innocent III. tried to let loose a crusading army, under Simon de Montfort, against the Cathari, and great brutalities were perpetrated, and at length the still more brutal Inquisition carried on the purposeless warfare.