Isabella must have been conscious of this feeling, and she must have rated it at its proper value. She had received in 1474 a very pitiful narrative poem of the New-Christian Anton Montoro, which painted with terrible vividness a slaughter of the conversos and implored justice upon the assassins, protesting the innocence of the New-Christians and the sincerity of their conversions. Her gentle nature must have been moved to compassion by that lament, and her acute mind must have perceived the evil passions and the envy that were stirring under the fair cloak of saintly zeal.
All these considerations being weighed, she resisted the representations of Ojeda.
But weightier than any may have been the reflection of the power which the tribunal of the Inquisition must place in the hands of the clergy. Already and very bravely she had expressed her resentment of clerical usurpation of royal rights in Spain, and to repress it she had not hesitated to front the Pope himself. If she acceded now to Ojeda’s request, she would be permitting the priesthood to set up a court which, not being subject to any temporal law, must alienate from her some portion of that sovereignty which so jealously she guarded.
Thus she came to dismiss the petition of the Dominican, and there can be little doubt when all the circumstances are considered—as presently they shall be—that in this she had the entire support of the Cardinal of Spain, Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, who was with her at the time.
Ojeda withdrew, baffled, but by no means resigned. He awaited a more favourable season, what time he kept the popular feeling in a state of ferment. And no sooner had Ferdinand come to rejoin his Queen in Seville than the Dominican renewed his importunities.
He hoped to find an ally in the King. Moreover he was now supported by Fr. Filippo de’ Barberi, the Sicilian Inquisitor. The latter had newly arrived in Spain, where he came to seek at the hands of the Catholic Sovereigns—who were rulers of Sicily—the confirmation of an ancient decree promulgated in 1223 by the Emperor Frederic II. By virtue of this decree one-third of the confiscated property of heretics became the perquisite of the Inquisition; and it also ordained that the governors of all districts should afford protection to the inquisitors and assistance in their work of prosecuting heretics and any Jew who might have contracted marriage with a Christian.
These privileges the Sovereigns duly confirmed, accounting it their duty to do so since they related to the Inquisition as established by Honorius III. But not on that account did Isabella yet lean towards the introduction of the tribunal into Castile.
It happened, however, that to the arguments of Ojeda and Barberi were added the persuasions of the papal legate a latere at the court of Castile—Nicolao Franco, Bishop of Trevisa—who conceived, no doubt, that the institution of the Inquisition here would be pleasing to Pope Sixtus IV, since it must increase the authority of the Church in Spain.
To Ferdinand it is probable that the suggestion was not without allurement, since it must have offered him a way at once to gratify the piety that was his, and—out of the confiscations that must ensue from the prosecution of so very wealthy a section of the community—to replenish the almost exhausted coffers of the treasury. When the way of conscience is also the way of profit, there is little difficulty in following it. But, after all, though joint sovereign of Spain and paramount in Aragon, Ferdinand had not in Castile the power of Isabella. It was her kingdom when all was said, and although his position there was by no means that of a simple prince-consort, yet he was bound by law and by policy to remain submissive to her will. In view of her attitude, he could do little more than add his own to the persuasions of the three priestly advocates, and amongst them they so pressed Isabella that she gave way to the extent of a compromise.
She consented that steps should be taken not only to check the Judaizing of the New-Christians, but also to effect conversions among the Jews themselves; and she entrusted the difficult task of enforcing the observance of the Christian faith and the Catholic dogmas to the Cardinal of Spain—than whom, from a Christian and humanitarian point of view, no man of his day could have been more desirable, which is as much as to say that from the point of view of his Catholic contemporaries no man could have been less so.