Ximenes sprang from the people. His ancestry, while respectable and deserving recognition as of the hidalgo class, was not noble. He renounced his baptismal name for that of the founder of his order, the Franciscans. He had no relatives, a fact which afterwards obtained for him the Regency.
The dignities of Mendoza were the most eminent in the hierarchy and the kingdom, and were all conferred before he had reached the meridian of life. He was Bishop of Calahorra and Siguenza, Archbishop of Seville and Toledo, Primate of Spain, a Prince of the Church, Patriarch of Alexandria, Legate of the Pope. He became Chancellor of Castile. He was appointed Captain-General under both Henry IV. and Isabella. He was most prominent in all the events of the civil and the Moorish wars. He won the battle of Olmedo for Juan II. He defeated the King of Portugal on the field of Toro. At twenty-four he was practically minister of state. At sixty-four he planned the last campaign before Granada as commander-in-chief of the besieging army. His hands raised upon the Tower of Comares the archiepiscopal cross of his diocese, the symbol of Christian supremacy and ecclesiastical power.
In habits, tastes, demeanor, and personal appearance a marked contrast existed between the two most famous prelates of the fifteenth century. Mendoza was epicurean, Ximenes ascetic. The table of the Great Cardinal was furnished with every luxury. His garments were of the finest quality, as befitted his rank. Jewels sparkled upon his fingers. His cleanliness excited the wonder and often the disapprobation of the pious, as savoring of heresy. None but youths of distinguished birth were admitted to his household. His morals partook of the laxity of the time. The ladies honored with his attentions were members of the aristocracy, daughters of noble houses, maids of honor to the Queen. His three sons were legitimatized by Pope Innocent VIII. in 1486 and by Isabella in 1487. Through their matrimonial connections, the blood of this famous ecclesiastical grandee has been mingled with that of many of the proudest families of Castile.
While the promotion of Mendoza to the highest offices of Church and State was due partly to his illustrious ancestry and partly to his eminent talents, that of Ximenes was derived entirely from his reputation for piety and wisdom. Honors were literally thrust upon him. With real or affected humility, he attempted to evade the search and disobey the commands of those who wished to raise him to absolute power. He loudly protested his unworthiness. He declared his preference for the duties and the seclusion of a private station. Even while at the height of his greatness, he never abandoned the habits of the monastery. He carried into the splendid archiepiscopal see of Toledo, the highest post in the ecclesiastical system of Europe, the practices of the penitent and the anchorite. Under his cardinal’s robes of scarlet and gold he wore constantly the cowl and knotted girdle of the Franciscan friars. A haircloth shirt, which was never changed, irritated his flesh. His diet was frugal to excess. “He only ate enough,” says his biographer, “to sustain the little life that penance had left him.” His food consisted principally of herbs, his only drink was water. His virtue was impregnable,—even St. Anthony himself might have envied him his constancy under temptation. To him was never imputed the reproach of frequent ablution, the stigma of the Moslem heretic. The constant use of a haircloth undergarment, while not conducive to personal purity, is readily productive of those physical conditions which, in the Middle Ages, were almost infallible signs of a good Christian.
The early life of Mendoza was passed amidst the atmosphere of the most dignified and punctilious court in Europe. His experience from boyhood fitted him for any service to which he might be assigned by the order of his king. He was thoroughly familiar with the arts of diplomacy. He had led his vassals in many a bloody encounter. With the skill of a successful general he had directed the movements of large bodies of troops in action. In every conflict he had fearlessly exposed himself to danger. He was indulgent to the faults of his ecclesiastical inferiors. For the glory of the Church he built and endowed the College of Valladolid. The Hospital of Santa Cruz at Toledo was a superb monument to his munificence. He expended great sums in charity. The debasing vice of bigotry was far from dominating his character.
The person of Mendoza was tall, erect, and commanding; his features handsome; his bearing that of a soldier and a gentleman; his manners affable and unaffected; in all respects he was the model of dignity, of gentleness, and of courtesy. His influence in the government was so great that he was everywhere known as “The Third King of Spain.” It was said of him as of Cæsar, “Quicquid volebat, valde volebat.”
Ximenes brought to the management of a great empire none of that familiarity with public affairs so essential to the statesman. His life had been bounded by the narrow horizon of the cloister. His reading had been confined to the homilies and polemics of the Fathers. At the assault of Oran, instead of leading his troops, he retired to pray in his tent. The university he established at Alcalá, as a rival to that of Salamanca, was far from realizing his hopes. His appearance disclosed his obscure lineage and his plebeian associations. His form was bent, his face emaciated, his manners shy and awkward. He possessed none of that winning grace which is the common birthright of his countrymen. In the administration of his office he was arbitrary and irascible. His obstinacy was only exceeded by the severity with which he enforced his decrees; his pursuit of heresy and monastic license, only by the vigor with which he encountered and crushed all opposition. His reputation for ability, for learning, for sanctity, for every attribute that evokes the admiring applause of mankind, far surpassed that of his predecessor among all ranks of his contemporaries.
Such were the two churchmen, both of whom had obtained the finest education afforded by their age and country; both founders of great colleges; both gifted with extraordinary talents; both clothed with despotic power; to whose agency is to be principally attributed the absolute annihilation of Jewish and Moslem science and literature in the Spanish Peninsula.
It is impossible for us at this distance of time to fully appreciate the enormous influence wielded by a prelate who dispensed the wealth and patronage of the ecclesiastical establishment of the Spanish monarchy. His capacity for good or evil was practically unlimited. He was the keeper of the royal conscience. The sentiments of every community, the decision of important questions of diplomacy, the adoption of measures vital to the permanence of national existence, the prosecution of war, the negotiation of peace, all depended upon the opinions and advice which emanated from the throne of the metropolitan see of Toledo. When to the prestige and revenues of the primacy were added the mysterious procedure and dreadful energy of the Inquisition, the formidable character of the power possessed by Ximenes may be conjectured. His will was law in every parish in the kingdom. Through the fears and mistaken devotion of a superstitious queen he was already the virtual ruler of Castile. His zeal was the more dangerous from the fact that it was sincere; no element of hypocrisy discredited the motives or impaired the supremacy of this uncompromising fanatic. The sweeping reforms he instituted among the clergy, and the rigor with which all disobedience was punished, awakened the resentment of every ecclesiastic whose lax morality or religious indifference had rendered him the object of official admonition or discipline. Those who appealed to the Pope were thrown into prison. Petitions for indulgence were treated with contempt. Remonstrances were chastised by suspension from functions and deprivation of benefices. The energy of his measures, the rudeness of his manners, the arbitrary, almost brutal, defiance of precedent and custom with which he treated his inferiors, his well-known control over the infamous tribunal whose public sacrifices in the name of religious unity had already terrorized the kingdom, his incorruptibility and self-mortification, invested the office of Ximenes with more than imperial authority. Isabella congratulated herself on her discernment. Her pious ambition was excited. In the hands of this active prelate the Moors of Granada might be speedily Christianized. The slow and pacific methods of Talavera had frequently aroused the displeasure and invoked the censures of the impatient Queen. Her partiality for the eccentric and determined churchman whose enforcement of long-neglected monastic regulations and whose condemnation of the luxurious habits of his subordinates had procured for him the open homage and secret execration of bishop and friar alike, whose inflexible decision, whose disregard of humanity and justice whenever he conceived the interests of the Church were involved, rendered him so offensively conspicuous, suggested him at once as a pre-eminently suitable instrument for the extermination of Moslem heresy and the rapid propagation of the Faith. He was, therefore, ordered to Granada, nominally as the adviser of Talavera in the work of spiritual regeneration, with the secret understanding, however, that his superior rank would exempt him from even the apparent exercise of official duties in a subordinate capacity. His first step, and one of which it is scarcely possible that Isabella could have been ignorant, was to procure a formal authorization from the Holy Office to investigate and punish the crime of heresy.
Armed with this document, and confident in the support of the Queen, Ximenes arrived at Granada in October, 1499. His conduct from the beginning was marked by unflinching audacity and resolution. The prestige of his dignity and the arrogance of his manners at once overawed the gentle Archbishop, who, renouncing the means which had achieved such great success, henceforth abandoned himself blindly to the merciless impulses of his distinguished superior. The latter was not long in profiting by the ascendency he had obtained. He claimed for himself supreme and dictatorial authority in matters not only ecclesiastical, but in questions often affecting the jurisdiction of the civil power. His first measures evinced none of the unrelenting severity of the inquisitor; they were corrupt, politic, conciliatory. The faquis and santons, whose influence with their countrymen was supposed to be the greatest and whose mercenary character had been notorious in the evil days preceding the surrender, were enlisted in the service of conversion by magnificent gifts of silken garments, jewels, and gold. With their zeal quickened by these potent arguments, the new missionaries had no difficulty in securing multitudes of proselytes. Their ardor was further stimulated by forcible representations of the inconveniences and trials which would inevitably be visited upon all who persisted in their adherence to error. Great emulation was excited by these extraordinary inducements to Mohammedan apostasy; each faqui reckoned with pride the number of converts he had conducted to the altar; the unprincipled populace welcomed, with feigned and interested enthusiasm, a religious compliance purchased with the mammon of unrighteousness; the Great Mosque of the Albaycin—in which quarter the Moors had, by a highly impolitic decree, been concentrated after the Conquest—was consecrated to Christianity, and within its precincts more than four thousand alleged penitents received the rite of baptism. This ceremony was effected without previous examination or instruction; and the candidates were equally ignorant of their duties and of the dreadful consequences involved in the sin of recantation. From that moment their moral responsibility was fixed. No excuse could be pleaded for the unconscious maintenance of heretical opinions or even for involuntary infractions of ecclesiastical discipline; the voice of the informer was ever ready to denounce, the hand of the inquisitor to punish.