“And for the greater ascertaining of the crime and demonstration of the truth, the said inquisitors having arrested some of the said offenders, New-Christians and Jews, they set the accused face to face, so that in the confession of their crimes there was conformity, and these confessions consisted of what has been here set down. In addition other further steps were taken to verify the places where the crimes were committed and the place where the child was buried; and they took one of the principal accused to the place where the child was buried, and there they found signs and demonstration of the truth of all.[167] Some of the said accused, and some already deceased, being prosecuted, they were sentenced and abandoned to the secular arm, all that we have set down being in accordance with the records of the proceedings to which we refer.
“The said ‘Testimonio’ written upon three sheets bearing our rubrics, we the said secretaries deliver by request of the Procurator-General of the village of La Guardia, by order of the Very Illustrious Señores of His Majesty’s Council of the Holy Inquisition in the City of Madrid in the Diocese of Toledo, on the 19th day of September of the year of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, 1569.
“Alonso de Doriga = Nec auro frangenda fides.
Matheo Vazquez = In cujus fide fœdera consistunt.
Pedro de Tapia.”
This “Testimonio” does not afford us the name of any one of the offenders—presumably that the holy place in which the tablets were exposed should not be desecrated. When it is compared with the account left by Moreno and the discrepancies between the two become apparent, when, further, the extravagances of Moreno’s story are considered, it is not surprising that the conclusion should have been reached that the whole affair was trumped up to forward that campaign against the Jews to which Torquemada was employing his enormous energies.
But the records of the trial of Yucé Franco discovered by Fidel Fita throw a very different light upon the matter. And whilst we know that Torquemada did avail himself to the utmost of this affair of the Santo Niño to encompass the banishment of the Jews from Spain, we must consider all notion that he himself simply invented the story to that end as completely dispelled by the evidence that is now to be examined.
From the records of the trial of Yucé Franco we are to-day not only able very largely to reconstruct the event, but also to present a complete instance of the application of the jurisprudence of the Inquisition. Indeed, had the archives of the Holy Office been ransacked for an entirely typical prosecution, embodying all the features peculiar to that terrible court, no better instance than this could have been forthcoming.
CHAPTER XX
THE ARREST OF YUCÉ FRANCO
In May or June of 1490—the time of year being approximately determined by the events that follow—a baptized Jew of Las Mesuras named Benito Garcia put up at an inn in the northern village of Astorga. He was an elderly man of some sixty years of age, a wool-comber by trade and a considerable traveller in the course of his trading.
In the common-room of the tavern where he sat at table were several men of Astorga, who, either in a drunken frolic or because they were thieves, went through the contents of his knapsack, and discovered in it some herbs and a communion wafer, which they at once assumed to be consecrated (and which it was grossest sacrilege for a layman so much as to touch).