There is no doubt that it was the success of the operations against the Moors of Granada that suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella the undertaking of a campaign, easier by far, and scarcely less lucrative, against the unhappy descendants of Abraham who had made their home in Spain.
The annual revenue that was derived by the Catholic sovereigns from the confiscations of the Inquisition amounted to a considerable income; and the source as yet showed no signs of drying up. Yet cupidity, marching hand in hand with intolerance—the Devil, as the Spanish proverb has it, ever lurking behind the Cross—the sovereigns resolved upon the perpetration of an act of State more dreadful than the most comprehensive of the Autos da Fe.
The work of the Holy Office was too slow. The limits of the Quemadero were too small. Half a million Jews yet lived unbaptized in Spain. They should be destroyed at a single blow. The Inquisition might be left to reckon with the New Christians whose conversion was unsatisfactory.
As soon as the Spanish Jews obtained an intimation of what was contemplated against them, they took steps to propitiate the sovereigns by the tender of a donative of thirty thousand ducats, toward defraying the expenses of the Moorish war; and an influential Jewish leader is said to have waited upon Ferdinand and Isabella, in their quarters at Santa Fe, to urge the acceptance of the bribe. The negotiations, however, were suddenly interrupted by Torquemada, who burst into the apartment where the sovereigns were giving audience to the Jewish deputy, and drawing forth a crucifix from beneath his mantle, held it up, exclaiming, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver; Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand; here he is, take him and barter him away.” The extravagant presumption of the Inquisitor-general would not perhaps have been as successful as it was had it not been obvious to the rapacious Ferdinand that thirty thousand ducats was a trifle compared with the plunder of the entire body of Jews in Spain. Yet the action of Torquemada was no doubt calculated to affect the superstitious mind of Isabella, and even the colder spirit of Ferdinand.
Whatever may have been the scruples of the Spanish sovereigns, the fanaticism of the Spanish people had been at this critical juncture stirred up to an unusual pitch of fury by the proceedings and reports of the Holy Office in a case which has attracted an amount of attention so entirely disproportionate to its apparent importance that it merits something more than a passing notice.
In June, 1490, a converted Jew of the name of Benito Garcia, on his way back from a pilgrimage to Compostella, was waylaid and robbed near Astorga, by some of the Christian inhabitants. A Jew, converted or otherwise, was a legitimate object of plunder. The contents of his knapsack not being entirely satisfactory, and the ecclesiastical authorities sniffing sacrilege in what was supposed to be a piece of the consecrated wafer, Garcia, and not the robbers, was arrested, subjected to incredible tortures, and finally handed over to the local inquisitors.
His case was heard with that of other Conversos; first at Segovia and afterward at Avila. Tortures were repeated. Spies were introduced in various guises and disguises, but no confession could be extorted.
At length, after a year and a half of such practices, the endurance of one of the accused gave way—the dreadful story affords some slight notion of the methods of the Inquisition—and the unhappy man invented a tale in accordance with what was demanded of him; the crucifixion of a Christian child; the tearing out of his heart, the theft of the Host from a Christian Church, and a magical incantation over the dreadful elements, directed against Christianity, and more particularly against the Holy Office. The Tribunal having been thus satisfied of the guilt of the accused, a solemn Auto da Fe was held at Avila, on the 16th of November, 1491, when two of the convicts were torn to death with red-hot pincers; three who had been more mercifully permitted to die under the preliminary tortures were burned in effigy; while the remaining prisoners were visited only with the slight punishment of strangulation before their consignment to the inevitable fire. That no boy, with or without a heart, could be found or invented, by the most rigorous examination; that no Christian child had disappeared from the neighborhood of the unhappy Jews at the time of their arrest—this surprised no one. In matters of Faith such evidences were wholly superfluous. Secura judícat Ecclesia.
That these poor Hebrews should have suffered torture and death for an imaginary sacrilege upon the person of an imaginary boy was indeed a thing by no means unexampled in the history of religious fanaticism. But the sequel is certainly extraordinary. With a view of exciting the indignation of the sovereigns and of the people against the Jews at an important moment, Torquemada devoted much attention to the publication throughout Spain of the dreadful story of the murdered boy, the Niño of La Guardia, the village where the crime is supposed to have taken place. As to the name of the victim, the authorities did not agree. Some maintained that it was Christopher, while others declared for John. But the recital of the awful wickedness of the Jews lost none of its force by adverse criticism. The legend spread from altar to altar throughout the country. The Niño de la Guardia at once became a popular hero, in course of time a popular saint; miracles were freely worked upon the spot where his remains had not been found, and something over a century later (1613) his canonization was demanded at Rome.
His remains, it was asserted by Francisco de Quevedo, could not be found on earth, only because his body as well as his soul had been miraculously carried up to heaven, where it was the most powerful advocate and protector of the Spanish monarchy. The story, moreover, has been twice dramatized—once by Lope de Vega—and no less than three admiring biographies of this imaginary martyr have been published in Spain within the last forty years of this nineteenth century.