Having concluded these arrangements, the Sovereigns repaired to Toledo. There, in the spring of the year 1480, the Cortes assembled to make oath of fealty to the infant Prince of Asturias to whom Isabella had given birth in June of 1478. Whilst this oath was the chief motive of the assembly, it was by no means the only business with which it had to deal. Many other matters received attention; amongst them the necessity for remedying the evils arising out of the commerce between Christians and Jews was seriously considered.
It was decreed that the old laws concerning the Jews, which lately had been falling into partial desuetude, should be re-enforced, particularly those which prescribed that all Jews should wear the distinguishing badge of the circlet of red cloth on the shoulders of their gabardines; that they should keep strictly to their Juderias, always retiring to these at nightfall; that walls to enclose these Juderias should be erected wherever they might still be wanting, and that no Jew should practise as a doctor, surgeon, apothecary, or innkeeper.
Beyond that, however, the Cortes did not go; and the institution of the Inquisition to deal with Judaizers was not so much as mentioned, which circumstance Llorente accepts as a further proof of the Queen’s antipathy to the Holy Office.
Coming at a time when the Jews were once more beginning to taste the sweets of freedom, there can be little doubt that these provisions, which thrust them back into bondage and ignominy, must have been extremely galling to them. It is possible that these measures against the men of his race spurred a New-Christian to the rash step of publishing a pamphlet in which he criticized and censured the royal action in the matter. Carried away by his feelings, the writer—intentionally or not—fell into heresy in the course of his writings, to which the Jeronymite monk, Hernando de Talavera, published a reply.
Rodrigo[62] assumes that this heretical pamphlet put an end to the Queen’s patience. It may very well have been the case, or at least it may have afforded Ferdinand and the others who desired the Inquisition a final argument whereby to overcome what reluctance still lingered with her.
Be that as it may, it was very soon after this—September 27, 1480—that the Sovereigns, who at the time were at Medina del Campo, acted at last upon the papal bull which had now been in their hands for nearly two years, and delegated their faculty of giving inquisitors to Castile to the Cardinal of Spain and Fr. Tomás de Torquemada.
Mendoza and Torquemada proceeded at once to carry out the task entrusted to them, and appointed as inquisitors of the faith for Seville—where Judaizing was represented to be most flagrant—the Dominican friars Juan de San Martino and Miguel Morillo. The latter was the Provincial of the Dominicans of Aragon, and was already a person of experience in such matters, having acted as inquisitor in Rousillon. To assist them in the discharge of their office, the secular priest Juan Ruiz de Medina, a doctor of canon law, and Juan Lopez de Barco, one of the Queen’s chaplains, were appointed, the former to the position of assessor, the latter to that of fiscal.
It is necessary, in view of the much that has been written, and although the danger be incurred of labouring the point, to examine more closely the attitude of the Sovereigns towards the tribunal which they now sanctioned.
Isabella’s zeal, both pious and political, urged her, as has been said, to proceed in such a way as should set a term to the unrest arising out of the public feeling against Judaizers and apostatizing Moriscoes (baptized Moors). Ferdinand not only shared her feelings, but pious zeal in him went to the lengths of bigotry, and he aimed essentially at a political unity that should be inseparably allied and interwoven with religious unity.