reduce them to conformity, they defiantly published a defamatory libel upon him and, with the assistance of certain laymen, afflicted him with injuries and expenses.' It was not without cause that, when Bishop Alfonso de Santa María procured the decree of 1434 from the council of Basle, he included a clause branding as heretics all Conversos who adhered to Jewish superstitions, directing bishops and inquisitors to enquire strictly after them. and to punish them condignly, and pronouncing liable to the penalties of fautorship all who support them in those practices." The decree, of course, proved a dead letter, but none the less was it the foreshadowing of the Inquisition. When Nicholas V, in 1449, issued his bull in favor of the Conversos, he followed the example of the council of Basle, in excepting those who secretly continued to practise Jewish rites. In the methods commonly employed to procure conversions the result was inevitable and incurable. What rendered this especially serious was the success of the! Conversos in obtaining high office in Church and State. Im-* portant sees were occupied by bishops of Jewish blood; the chapters, the monastic orders and the curacies were full of them, they were prominent in the royal council and everywhere enjoyed positions of influence. The most powerful among them-the Santa Marías, the Dávilas and their following-had turned against the royal favorite Alvaro de Luna and, with the dis-. contented nobles, were plotting his ruin, when he seems to have conceived the idea that, if he could introduce the Inquisition in Castile, he might find in it a weapon wherewith to subdue them. At least this is the only explanation of an application made to Nicholas V, in 1451, by Juan II, for a delegation of papal inquisitorial power for the chastisement of Judaizing Christians. The popes had too long vainly desired to introduce the Inquisition in Castile for Nicholas to neglect this opportunity. He promptly commissioned the Bishop of Osma, his vicar general, and the Scholasticus of Salamanca as inquisitors, either by themselves or through such delegates as they might appoint, to investigate and punish without appeal all such offenders, to deprive them of ecclesiastical dignities and benefices and of temporal possessions, to pronounce them incapable of holding such positions in future, to imprison and degrade them, and, if 1 Ripoll Bullar. Ord. FF. Prædic. III, 347. 'C. Basiliens. Sess. XIX, c. vi (Harduin. VIII, 1193). the offence required, to abandon them to the secular arm for burning. Full power was granted to perform any acts necessary or opportune to the discharge of these duties and, if resistance were offered, to invoke the aid of the secular power. All this was within the regular routine of the inquisitorial office, but there was one clause which showed that the object of the measure was the destruction of de Luna's enemies, the Converso bishops, for the commission empowered the appointees to proceed even against bishops-a faculty never before granted to inquisitors and subsequently, as we shall see, withheld when the new Inquisition was organized. All this was the formal establishment of the Inquisition on Castilian soil and, if circumstances had permitted its development, it would not have been left for Isabella to introduce the institution. The Inquisition, however, rested on the secular power for its efficiency. In Spain, especially, there was little respect for the naked papal authority, while that of Juan II was too much enfeebled to enable him to establish so serious an innovation. The New Christians recognized that their safety depended on de Luna's downfall; the conspiracy against him won over the nerveless Juan II and, in 1453, he was hurriedly condemned and executed. Naturally the bull remained inoperative, and, some ten years later, Alonso de Espina feelingly complains "Some are heretics and Christian perverts, others are Jews, others Saracens, others devils. There is no one to investigate the errors of the heretics. The ravening wolves, O Lord, have entered thy flock, for the shepherds are few; many are hirelings and as hirelings they care only for shearing and not for feeding thy sheep.""" To Fray Alonso de Espina may be ascribed a large share in hastening the development of organized persecution in Spain, by inflaming the race hatred of recent origin which already needed no stimulation. He was a man of the highest reputation for learning and sanctity and when, early in his career, he was discouraged by the slender result of his preaching, a miracle revealed to him the favor of Heaven and induced him to per 1 Raynald. Annal. ann. 1451, n. 6. 2 Fortalicium Fidei, Prolog. (Ed. 1494, fol. iia). The date of the Fortalicium is commonly assigned to 1459, the year which it bears upon its rubric, but on fol. lxxviib the author speaks of 1460 years having elapsed since the birth of Christ and, as this is at nearly the first third of the book, it may not have been completed for a year or two later. severe.1 In 1453 we find him administering to Alvaro de Luna the last consolations of religion at his hurried execution, and he became the confessor of Henry IV. In 1454, when a child was robbed and murdered at Valladolid and the body was scratched up by dogs, the Jews were, of course, suspected and confession was obtained by torture. Alonso happened to be there and aroused much public excitement by his sermons on the subject, in which he asserted that the Jews had ripped out the child's heart, had burnt it and, by mingling the ashes with wine, had made an unholy sacrament, but unfortunately, as he tells us, bribery of the judges and of King Henry enabled the offenders to escape. The next year, 1455, as Provincial of the Observantine Franciscans, he was engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to drive the Conventuals out of Segovia or to obtain a separate convent for the Observantines. Thenceforth he seems to have concentrated his energies on the endeavor to bring about the forced conversion of the Jews and to introduce the Inquisition as a corrective of the apostasy of the Conversos. He is usually considered to have himself belonged to the class of Conversos who entertained an inextinguishable hatred for their former brethren, but there is no evidence of this and the probabilities are altogether against it." His Fortalicium Fidei is a deplorable exhibition of the fanatic passions which finally dominated Spain. He rakes together,' from the chronicles of all Europe, the stories of Jews slaying Christian children in their unholy rites, of their poisoning wells and fountains, of their starting conflagrations and of all the other horrors by which a healthy detestation of the unfortunate race was created and stimulated. The Jewish law, he tells us, Nicol. Anton. Bibl. Vet. Hispan. Lib. x, cap. ix. 'Amador de los Rios, III, 60, 136.-Valera, Memoria de diversas Hazañas, cap. iv. Fortalicium Fidei, fol. cxlvi. • Colmenares, Hist. de Segovia, cap. xxxi, ? 3.-Valera, loc. cit. All recent Spanish authorities, I believe, assume that Fray Alonso was a Converso, but the learned Nicolás Antonio (loc. cit.) says nothing about it, and Jo. Chr. Wolff (Bibl. Hebrææ II, 1123) points out that he nowhere alludes to his own experience as he could scarce have failed to do when accusing the Jews of matters which they denied. He cites (fol. cxlixa) Pablo de Santa María, Bishop of Burgos, for their prayers against Christians and another learned Converso as to a secret connected with the Hebrew letters (fol. xciva). His knowledge concerning the Jews was thus wholly at second hand and his assaults on the Judaizing of the Conversos have every appearance of emanating from an Old Christian. commands them to slay Christians and to despoil them whenever practicable and they obey it with quenchless hatred and insatiable thirst for revenge. Thrice a day in their prayers they repeat "Let there be no hope for Meschudanim (Conversos); may all heretics and all who speak against Israel be speedily cut off; may the kingdom of the proud be broken and destroyed and may all our enemies be crushed and humbled speedily in our days!"" But the evil now wrought by Jews is trifling to that which they will work at the coming of Antichrist, for they will be his supporters. Alexander the Great shut them up in the mountains of the Caspian, adjoining the realms of the Great Khan or monarch of Cathay. There, between the castles of Gog and Magog, confined by an enchanted wall, they have multiplied until now they are numerous enough to fill twenty-four kingdoms. When Antichrist comes they will break loose and rally around him, as likewise will all the Jews of the Diaspora, for they will regard him as their promised Messiah and will worship him as their God, and with their united aid he will overrun the earth. With such eventualities in prospect it is no wonder that Fray Alonso could convince himself, in opposition to the canon law, that the forced conversion of the Jews was lawful and expedient, as well as the baptism of their children without their consent.2 When such was the temper in which a man of distinguished learning and intelligence discussed the relations between Jews and Christians, we can imagine the character of the sermons in which, from numerous pulpits, the passions of the people were inflamed against their neighbors. If open Judaism thus was abhorrent, still worse was the insidious heresy of the Conversos who pretended to be Christians and who more or less openly continued to practise Jewish rites and perverted the faithful by their influence and example. These abounded on every hand and there was scarce an effort made to repress or to punish them. The law, from the earliest times, provided the death penalty for their offence, but there was none found to enforce it. Fray Alonso dolefully asserts that they 1 The prayers attributed to the Jews were the subject of repeated repressive legislation. See Ordenanzas Reales, vIII, iii, 34. 2 Fortalicium Fidei, fol. cxlii-ix, clxxxi-iii. 3 Fuero Juzgo, XII, iii, 27.-Fuero Real, Iv, i, 1.-Partidas, VII, xxiv, 7. In fact, these laws seem to have been a dead letter almost from the first. I have not met with an instance of their enforcement. succeeded by their presents in so blinding princes and prelates that they were never punished and that, when one person accused them, three would come forward in their favor. He relates an instance of such an attempt, in 1458 at Formesta, where a barber named Fernando Sánchez publicly maintained monotheism. Fortunately Bishop Pedro of Palencia had zeal enough to prosecute him, when his offence was proved and, under fear of the death penalty, he recanted, but when he was condemned to imprisonment for life so much sympathy was excited by the unaccustomed severity that, in accordance with numerous petitions, the sentence was commuted to ten years' exile. In 1459, at Segovia, a number of Conversos were by an accident discovered in the synagogue, praying at the feast of Tabernacles, but nothing seems to have been done with them. At Medina del Campo, in the same year, Fray Alonso was informed that there were more than a hundred who denied the truth of the New Testament, but he could do nothing save preach against them, and subsequently he learned that in one house there were more than thirty men, at that very time, laid up in consequence of undergoing circumcision. It is no wonder that he earnestly advocated the introduction of the Inquisition as the only cure for this scandalous condition of affairs, that he argued in its favor with the warmest zeal and answered all objections in a manner which showed that he was familiar with its workings from a careful study of the Clementines and of Eymeric's Directorium.1 The good Cura de los Palacios is equally emphatic in his testimony as to the prevalence of Judaism among the Conversos. For the most part, he says, they continued to be Jews, or rather they were neither Christians nor Jews but heretics, and this heresy increased and flourished through the riches and pride of many wise and learned men, bishops and canons and friars and abbots and financial agents and secretaries of the king and of the magnates. At the commencement of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella this heresy grew so powerful that the clerks were on the point of preaching the law of Moses. These heretics avoided baptizing their children and, when they could not prevent it, they washed off the baptism on returning from the church; they ate meat on fast days and unleavened bread at ' Fortalicium Fidei, fol. liii-liv, lxxv-vi, clxxviii-ix. |