[62]. Some of these took the form of generosity at other people’s expense. The town of Palos was ordered, as punishment for some offence, to provide two caravels and stores.
[63]. Quoted by Florez. ‘Reinas Catolicos.’
[64]. Ibid. Both Luis de Sant’angel, who served as accountant general, and Gabriel Sanchez, the Aragonese treasurer, were of Jewish descent.
[65]. From Ulick Burke’s ‘History of Spain.’ Edited by Martin Hume. Only five years after the expulsion from Spain, as many of the Spanish Jews had fled to Portugal, Isabel, through her daughter, who had married the King of Portugal, coerced the latter to expel all Jews from his country.
[66]. It is said that Ferdinand tried to save the life of his assailant, who had been condemned to the most cruel and awful tortures as a punishment. The Catalans, furious at being baulked of their vengeance, appealed to Isabel, who decided that the sentence should be carried out, but that the victim should be secretly suffocated first.
[67]. The Luis de Sant’angel and the Sanchez letter have been published several times, but the letter to the Sovereigns has been lost, but for some passages quoted by Las Casas.
[68]. It is related that the Queen concealed from Jimenez her intention to make him Primate, and handed him unexpectedly the papal bull addressed to him as: The venerable brother Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, Archbishop-elect of Toledo. When the friar saw the superscription he dropped the document and fled, crying, This bull is not for me. He was pursued and caught two leagues from Madrid by envoys from Isabel, and still refused the great preferment on the ground of his unworthiness. He stood out for six months until Isabel obtained from the Pope a peremptory command to him to accept the archbishopric, and even then he insisted that the vast revenues should be used for pious and charitable purposes.
[69]. A full account of these complicated intrigues will be found in the present writer’s ‘Wives of Henry VIII.‘
[70]. Father Florez quotes a remark of Isabel, on another occasion, warmly approving of the bullfight, ‘which, though foreigners who have not seen it condemn as barbarous, she considered it very different, and as a diversion where valour and dexterity shine.’
[71]. Florez, ‘Reinas Catolicos.’