To support it he brought an indubitable sincerity and disinterestedness of motives; he brought a reputation for sanctity derived from the rigid purity of his life and the stern asceticism which he practised—a reputation which could not fail to act upon the imagination of a woman of Isabella’s pious temperament; and, finally, he brought the dominant, masterful personality and the burning eloquence that were his own.
When all this is taken into account it is not surprising that the Queen’s resistance, weakened already by the onslaughts of Ojeda and his associates, the King and the papal legate, should at last have broken down; and that under the compelling persuasion of the Prior of Holy Cross she should reluctantly have consented to the establishment of the Holy Office in her dominions.
Thus it befell that by order of the Catholic Sovereigns their Orator at the Pontifical Court, D. Francisco de Santillana, applied to Sixtus IV for a bull that should empower Ferdinand and Isabella to set up the tribunal of the Inquisition in Castile, to enable them—as Bernaldez puts it—to proceed to the extirpation of heresy “by the way of fire”—por via del fuego.
This bull was duly granted under date of November 7, 1478.
It gave the Sovereigns the faculty of electing three bishops or archbishops or other God-fearing and upright priests, regular or secular, of over forty years of age, who must be masters or bachelors of divinity and doctors or licentiates of canon law, to make inquisition throughout the kingdom against heretics, apostates, and their abettors.
His Holiness accorded to the men so elected the requisite jurisdiction to proceed according to law and custom, and he further empowered the Sovereigns to annul such nominations as they might make and to replace their nominees as they saw fit.[61]
The Sovereigns were in Cordova when the bull reached them in the following month of December. But they did not at once proceed to act upon it. Before doing so, Isabella made one last effort to repress the Judaizing and apostatizing movement by the gentler measures concerted with the Cardinal of Spain in 1477.
To the task of continuing with increased vigour the teachings of the “catechism” drawn up by Mendoza she now appointed Diego Alonso de Solis, Bishop of Cadiz, D. Diego de Merlo, Coadjutor of Seville, and Alonso de Ojeda, to whom these royal orders must have been a fresh source of disappointment and chagrin.
Torquemada, we must assume, had withdrawn once more to his convent of Segovia, and perhaps the removal of his stern influence enabled the Queen to make this last effort to avoid the course to which he had all but constrained her.