In these last particulars his confession is of an extreme frankness, and we can only suppose that he is merely repeating what the torture had already extracted from him. Completely to elucidate the matter as it concerns Benito Garcia, we should require to be in possession of the full records of his own trial (which have not yet been discovered), whereas at present we have to depend upon odd documents from that dossier which are introduced in Yucé Franco’s as relating to the latter.
Questioned more closely concerning these Jews he has mentioned—Mosé and Yucé Franco—Benito states that they lived with their father, Ça Franco, at Tenbleque, that he was in the habit of visiting them upon matters of business, and that he had frequently eaten meat at their house on Fridays and Saturdays and other forbidden days, and had often given them money to purchase oil for the synagogue lamps.
We know that, as a consequence of these confessions, Ça Franco, an old man of eighty years of age, and his son Yucé, a lad of twenty who was a cobbler by trade, were arrested on July 1, 1489, for proselytizing practices—i.e. for having induced Benito Garcia to abandon the Christian faith to which he had been converted.
Ça’s other son, Mosé, was either dead at the time or else he died very shortly after arrest and before being brought to trial.
Juan de Ocaña, too, was arrested upon the same grounds.
They were taken to Segovia, and thrown into the prison of the Holy Office in that city. In this prison Yucé Franco fell so seriously ill that he believed himself at the point of death.
A physician named Antonio de Avila, who spoke either Hebrew or the jargon of Hebrew and Romance that was current among the Jews of the Peninsula, went to attend to the sick youth. Yucé implored this doctor to beseech the inquisitors to send a Jew to pray with him and to prepare him for death—“que le dixiese las cosas que disen los Judios quando se quieren morir.”
The physician, who, like all the family of the Inquisition, was himself a spy, duly conveyed the request to the inquisitors. They seized the chance to put into practice one of the instructions advanced by Eymeric. They sent a Dominican, one Frey Alonso Enriquez, disguised as a Jew, to minister to the supposed moribund. The friar had a fluent command of the language spoken by the Jews of Spain. He introduced himself to the lad as a Rabbi named Abraham, and completely imposed upon him and won his confidence.
He pressed Yucé to confide in him, and in his manner of doing so he proceeded along the crafty lines advocated by the “Directorium.”
Eymeric, as will be remembered, enjoins that when a prisoner is examined, the precise accusation against him should not be disclosed; rather he should be questioned as to why he conceives that he has been arrested and by whom he supposes himself to have been accused, with the object of perhaps discovering further and hitherto unsuspected matters against him.