History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

by John William Draper

The temporal sovereigns were only too desirous to make use of this powerful engine for their own political purposes. Against this the popes strongly protested. They were not willing that its use should pass out of the ecclesiastical hand.

The Inquisition, having already been tried in the south of France, had there proved to be very effective for the suppression of heresy. It had been introduced into Aragon. Now was assigned to it the duty of dealing with the Jews.

In the old times under Visigothic rule these people had greatly prospered, but the leniency that had been shown to them was succeeded by atrocious persecution, when the Visigoths abandoned their Arianism and became orthodox. The most inhuman ordinances were issued against them—a law was enacted condemning them all to be slaves. It was not to be wondered at that, when the Saracen invasion took place, the Jews did whatever they could to promote its success. They, like the Arabs, were an Oriental people, both traced their lineage to Abraham, their common ancestor; both were believers in the unity of God. It was their defense of that doctrine that had brought upon them the hatred of their Visigothic masters.

Under the Saracen rule they were treated with the highest consideration. They became distinguished for their wealth and their learning. For the most part they were Aristotelians. They founded many schools and colleges. Their mercantile interests led them to travel all over the world. They particularly studied the science of medicine. Throughout the middle ages they were the physicians and bankers of Europe. Of all men they saw the course of human affairs from the most elevated point of view. Among the special sciences they became proficient in mathematics and astronomy; they composed the tables of Alfonso, and were the cause of the voyage of De Gama. They distinguished themselves greatly in light literature. From the tenth to the fourteenth century their literature was the first in Europe. They were to be found in the courts of princes as physicians, or as treasurers managing the public finances.

The orthodox clergy in Navarre had excited popular prejudices against them. To escape the persecutions that arose, many of them feigned to turn Christians, and of these many apostatized to their former faith. The papal nuncio at the court of Castile raised a cry for the establishment of the Inquisition. The poorer Jews were accused of sacrificing Christian children at the Passover, in mockery of the crucifixion; the richer were denounced as Averroists. Under the influence of Torquemada, a Dominican monk, the confessor of Queen Isabella, that princess solicited a bull from the pope for the establishment of the Holy Office. A bull was accordingly issued in November, 1478, for the detection and suppression of heresy. In the first year of the operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or imprisoned for life. Whoever of the persecuted race could flee, escaped for his life. Torquemada, now appointed inquisitor-general for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office by his ferocity. Anonymous accusations were received, the accused was not confronted by witnesses, torture was relied upon for conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one could hear the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible duplicity it was affirmed that the torment had not been completed at first, but had only been suspended out of charity until the following day! The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burnt at the stake ten thousand two hundred and twenty persons, six thousand eight hundred and sixty in effigy, and otherwise punished ninety-seven thousand three hundred and twenty-one. This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles wherever he could find them, And burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated Judaism. With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition.

But all these frightful atrocities proved failures. The conversions were few. Torquemada, therefore, insisted on the immediate banishment of every unbaptized Jew. On March 30, 1492, the edict of expulsion was signed. All unbaptized Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, were ordered to leave the realm by the end of the following July. If they revisited it, they should suffer death. They might sell their effects and take the proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver. Exiled thus suddenly from the land of their birth, the land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody would purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The Spanish clergy occupied themselves by preaching in the public squares sermons filled with denunciations against their victims, who, when the time for expatriation came, swarmed in the roads and filled the air with their cries of despair. Even the Spanish onlookers wept at the scene of agony. Torquemada, however, enforced the ordinance that no one should afford them any help.

Of the banished persons some made their way into Africa, some into Italy; the latter carried with them to Naples ship-fever, which destroyed not fewer than twenty thousand in that city, and devastated that peninsula; some reached Turkey, a few England. Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and old people, died by the way; many of them in the agonies of thirst.

This action against the Jews was soon followed by one against the Moors. A pragmatica was issued at Seville, February, 1502, setting forth the obligations of the Castilians to drive the enemies of God from the land, and ordering that all unbaptized Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon above the age of infancy should leave the country by the end of April. They might sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they were forbidden to emigrate to the Mohammedan dominions; the penalty of disobedience was death. Their condition was thus worse than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they chose. Such was the fiendish intolerance of the Spaniards, that they asserted the government would be justified in taking the lives of all the Moors for their shameless infidelity.

What an ungrateful return for the toleration that the Moors in their day of power had given to the Christians! No faith was kept with the victims. Granada had surrendered under the solemn guarantee of the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. At the instigation of Cardinal Ximenes that pledge was broken, and, after a residence of eight centuries, the Mohammedans were driven out of the land.

The coexistence of three religions in Andalusia—the Christian, the Mohammedan, the Mosaic—had given opportunity for the development of Averroism or philosophical Arabism. This was a repetition of what had occurred at Rome, when the gods of all the conquered countries were confronted in that capital, and universal disbelief in them all ensued. Averroes himself was accused of having been first a Mussulman, then a Christian, then a Jew, and finally a misbeliever. It was affirmed that he was the author of the mysterious book "De Tribus Impostoribus."