Statistics, as a rule, are not convincing, and figures are rarely impressive; yet it may be added that, according to Llorente’s cautious estimate, over ten thousand persons were burned alive during the eighteen years of Torquemada’s supremacy alone; that over six thousand more were burned in effigy either in their absence or after their death, and their property acquired by the Holy Office; while the number of those whose goods were confiscated, after undergoing less rigorous punishments, is variously computed at somewhat more or somewhat less than one hundred thousand. But it is obvious that even these terrible figures give but a very feeble idea of the vast sum of human suffering that followed the steps of this dreadful institution. For they tell no tale of the thousands who died, and the tens of thousands who suffered, in the torture chamber. They hardly suggest the anguish of the widow and the orphan of the principal victims, who were left, bereaved and plundered, to struggle with a hard and unsympathetic world, desolate, poor, and disgraced.
Nor does the most exaggerated presentment of human suffering tell of the disastrous effects of the entire system upon religion, upon morals, upon civil society at large. The terrorism, the espionage, the daily and hourly dread of denunciation, in which every honest man and woman must have lived, the boundless opportunities for extortion and for the gratification of private vengeance and worldly hatred, must have poisoned the whole social life of Spain. The work of the Inquisition, while it tended, no doubt, to make men orthodox, tended also to make them false, and suspicious, and cruel. Before the middle of the sixteenth century, the Holy Office had profoundly affected the national character; and the Spaniard, who had been celebrated in Europe during countless centuries for every manly virtue, became, in the new world that had been given to him, no less notorious for a cruelty beyond the imagination of a Roman emperor, and a rapacity beyond the dreams of a republican proconsul.
Torquemada and Ferdinand may have burned their thousands and plundered their ten thousands in Spain. Their disciples put to death millions of the gentlest races of the earth, and ravaged without scruple or pity the fairest and most fertile regions of the new Continent which had been given to them to possess.
As long as the Inquisition confined its operations to the Jews and the Moors, the Old Christians were injured and depraved by the development of those tendencies to cruelty and rapacity that lie dormant in the heart of every man. But this was not the end. For when Spain at length sheltered no more aliens to be persecuted and plundered in the name of religion, and murder and extortion were forced to seek their easy prey in the new world beyond the Atlantic Ocean, the Holy Office turned its attention to domestic heresy; and the character of the Spaniard in Europe became still further demoralized and perverted. Every man was suspected. Every man became suspicious. The lightest word might lead to the heaviest accusation. The nation became somber and silent. Religious life was but a step removed from heresy. Religion died. Original thought was above all things dangerous. The Spaniard took refuge in Routine. Social intercourse was obviously full of peril. A prudent man kept himself to himself, and was glad to escape the observation of his neighbors. Castile became a spiritual desert. The Castilian wrapped himself in his cloak, and sought safety in dignified abstraction.
The Holy Office has done its work in Spain. A rapacious government, an enslaved people, a hollow religion, a corrupt Church, a century of blood, three centuries of shame, all these things followed in its wake. And the country of Viriatus and Seneca, of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, where Ruy Diaz fought, and Alfonso studied, and where two warrior kings in two successive centuries defied Rome temporal and Rome spiritual, and all the crusaders of Europe—Spain, hardly conquered by Scipio or by Cæsar, was enslaved by the dead hand of Dominic.
CHAPTER VI
THEIR CATHOLIC MAJESTIES
THE BANISHMENT OF THE JEWS—INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS—THE SPANIARDS IN ITALY—THE VICTORIES OF GONSALVO—THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA
The fall of Granada left the Catholic sovereigns free to turn their attention more completely to the domestic affairs of the kingdom; and it seems moreover to have increased the bigotry both of the Church and of the Court, and to have added new zeal to the fury of the Inquisition.
The conquest of the Moorish kingdom was said by pious ecclesiastics to be a special sign or manifestation of the approval by Heaven of the recent institution of the Holy Office. The knights and nobles, proud of their military successes, may have attributed the victory to causes more flattering to their valor, their skill, and their perseverance. The common people, as yet not demoralized, but gorged with plunder, and invited to occupy without purchase the fairest province in the Peninsula, were little disposed to quarrel with the policy of Ferdinand; and far from feeling any pity for the sufferings of the vanquished Moors, they sighed for new infidels to pillage. And new infidels were promptly found.
The Inquisition so far had troubled itself but little with Christian heretics. The early Spanish Protestantism of the thirteenth century had died away. The later Spanish Protestantism of the sixteenth century had not yet come into existence. Few men had done more than Averroes of Cordova and Ramon Lull of Palma to awaken religious thought in Medieval Europe; yet speculative theology has never been popular among the Spanish people. It was against the Jews, renegade or relapsed, even more than the avowedly unconverted, that the Holy Office directed all its exertions until the end of the fifteenth century. By April, 1492, although a great number of the unfortunate Hebrews had already found their way to the Quemadero, there was still a very large Jewish population in Spain, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the most orderly, but, unhappily for themselves, the most wealthy of all the inhabitants of the Peninsula.