The blood of the inquisitor, we learn from the same source, boiled upon the stones of the church where it had fallen, and continued to do so for a fortnight afterwards; whilst on any of the twelve days immediately following the night of his murder, a handkerchief pressed to the stones upon which his blood had been shed, when removed, was found to be blood-stained.
These, says Trasmiera, were miracles of which all were witnesses. There is much more of the same kind—including an account of the inquisitor’s apparitions after death, as testified by Mosen Blanco, to whom the ghost appeared, and with whom it conversed at length—to be found in Trasmiera’s “Vida y Muerte del Venerable Inquisidor, Pedro Arbués.”
The sword with which he was slain was preserved in the Metropolitan Church of Zaragoza, a relic sanctified by the blood that had embrued it.
He was buried in the same church, and on the spot where he fell Isabella raised a beautiful monument to his memory in 1487. Part of its inscription ran: “Happy Zaragoza! Rejoice that here is buried he who is the glory of the martyrs.”
He was beatified two hundred years later by Alexander VII, largely in consequence of the efforts of the Spanish inquisitors, who perceived what an added prestige it would give their order if one of its members were worshipped as a martyr. His canonization followed in the nineteenth century. It was effected by Pope Pius IX, and was the subject of much derisory comment in the Rome of that day, which had just broken the shackles of clerical government that had trammelled it for some fifteen hundred years.
CHAPTER XV
TORQUEMADA’S FURTHER “INSTRUCTIONS”
The intrepid but ineffectual resistance offered by Zaragoza to the Inquisition was emulated by the principal cities of Aragon; one and all protested against the institution of this tribunal under the new form which Torquemada had given it.
But nowhere was resistance of the least avail against the iron purpose of the Grand Inquisitor, armed with the entire force of civil justice to constrain the people into submission to the ecclesiastical will.
Teruel had been thrown into open revolt by the proposal to appoint inquisitors there; and so fierce and determined was the armed resistance, that not until the King’s troops made their appearance in the streets of that city, in March 1485, were order and obedience restored.
In Valencia, too, there was a vigorous opposition led by the nobles, and throughout Cataluña the resistance was so resolute that it was not until two years later that the Sovereigns were able to reduce the people to submission.