Matters were becoming strained; an open rupture impended between Spain and the Vatican. But the Sovereigns had notified the Pope that it was their intention to summon a general council of the Church to settle the matter in dispute, and no Pope of those days could contemplate with equanimity a general council assembled for the purpose of sitting in judgment upon his decrees. Whatever the result, since at these councils the papal authority was questioned, it must follow that thereafter that authority would be impaired. Therefore this was the stock threat employed to bring a recalcitrant pontiff to a reasonable frame of mind.
It made Sixtus realize the strength of purpose that was opposed to him; and, knowing as he did that this resoluteness backed an undeniable right which he had violated, he perceived that he dared carry insistence no further. So, despite his earlier assertion that the power which he held from God could be limited by no will but his own and governed by no consideration but that of the interests of the Faith, he gave way completely.
The three royal nominees were duly confirmed in the vacant sees, and Sixtus gave an undertaking that in future he would make no appointments to the benefices of Spain save of such ecclesiastics as the Catholic Sovereigns should nominate.32
It is to be added that in acting upon this signal victory which she had won, Isabella used the faculty it gave her with such pious wisdom, sincerity, and discretion that had the Pope but followed her example in the appointment of dignitaries, it would have contributed to the greater honour and glory of the Church. For she sternly opposed the granting of benefices upon any grounds but those of absolute merit.
Having won her way in this, she was the better able to curb the predatory habits of her clergy by edicts that limited their power to proper clerical confines.
“It is amazing,” comments Pulgar, “that a woman should have been able, single-handed and in so little time, by her judgment and perseverance to accomplish what many men and great kings had been unable to do in many years.”
“Properly to judge the notable improvements,” says Rosseeuw St. Hilaire,33 “which this reign effected in industry and agriculture, it would be necessary to follow year by year the table of ordinances issued by the Catholic Sovereigns. It would be seen that in many things the genius of the founders of the Castilian Monarchy forestalled the work of centuries. The happy results of these reforms were soon experienced everywhere: the highways were purged of malefactors, new roads of communication were opened up, rivers were bridged, consular tribunals established in commercial centres, consulates created in Flanders, England, France, and Italy; with maritime commerce expanding daily and in a measure with the progress of industry, new buildings sprang up in every city, and the population rapidly increased. All announced a new era of regeneration in Castile. Contemporary writers, struck by these prodigies, exalt with one voice this glorious reign which opens new destinies to Spain.”
It is certain that in no other country in Europe at this date were the laws so well maintained and the rights of the individual so well protected. Justice was rigorously done, there were no longer arbitrary imprisonments and sequestrations, whilst the unequal and capricious taxation of the past was abolished for all time.
“Such,” says Marinæus, “was the strict justice meted out to each in this happy reign that all men, nobles and knights, traders and husbandmen, rich and poor, masters and servants, were treated alike and received equally their share of it.”
Where so much was good, where so much stout service was done to the cause of progress and civilization, it is the more deplorable to find in this reign the one evil thing that is now to be considered—so evil that it must be held to counterbalance and stultify all the excellences of Isabella’s sway.
The particular praise which so far we have heard their contemporaries bestowing upon the Catholic Sovereigns, is a praise which every man in every age must echo.
But there was praise as loud upon another score, as universally uttered by every contemporary and many subsequent historians, some no doubt because they were sincere in the deadly bigotry that inspired it, others because they did not dare to express themselves in different terms.
“By her,” cries Bernaldez, as a climax to his summing-up of her many virtues and wise provisions, “was burnt and destroyed the most evil and abominable Mosaic, Talmudic, Jewish heresy.”
And Mariana, the historian, accounts the introduction of the Inquisition into Spain the most glorious feature of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. He is setting it above all the moral splendours of that day when he exclaims:
“Still better and happier fortune for Spain was the establishment in Castile at about this time of a new and holy tribunal of severe and grave judges for the purpose of inquiring into and punishing heretical pravity and apostasy....”34
It would be unjust to suppose that there is a man to be found to-day in the Church of Rome, of which the Spanish Inquisition was a deplorable and integral part, who can turn with us in other than regret to consider this black shadow that lies across one of the brightest pages of history.
CHAPTER V
THE JEWS IN SPAIN
You have seen the Catholic Sovereigns instilling order into that distracted land of Spain, enforcing submissiveness to the law, instituting a system of police for the repression of brigandage, curtailing the depredations of the nobles, checking the abuses and usurpations of the clergy, restoring public credit, and generally quelling all the elements of unrest that had afflicted the State.
But one gravely disturbing element still remained in the bitter rancour prevailing between Christian and Jew.
“Some clerics and many laymen,” says Pulgar,35 “informed the Sovereigns that there were in the Kingdom many Christians of Jewish extraction who were Judaizing36 again and holding Jewish rites in their houses, and who neither believed the Catholic Faith nor performed the Catholic duties. They implored the Sovereigns, as they were Christian princes, to punish that detestable error, because if left unpunished it might so spread that our Holy Catholic Faith must receive great harm.”
Exactly to realize the position at the time, and the force behind the arguments employed to induce the Catholic Sovereigns to complete the ordering of the kingdom by the repression of the re-Judaizing, or apostasy, of the New-Christians—as the baptized Jews and their descendants were termed—it is necessary to take at least a brief retrospective survey of the history of the Israelites in Spain.
At what period the Jews first appeared in the peninsula it is not easy to determine with accuracy.
Salazar de Mendoza and other ancient historians, who base their writings upon the work of Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, put forward views upon this subject that are curious rather than important.
They assert that the Kingdom of Spain was founded by Tubal, the son of Japhet, who had Europe for his portion when the division was made among the sons of Noah. Hence it was called Tubalia, and later on Sepharad by the Jews, and Hesperida by the Greeks. They hold that the first Jews in the Iberian Peninsula were probably those who came with Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Chaldea, and that he brought with him, in addition to Chaldeans and Persians, ten tribes of Israel, who peopled Toledo,37 and built there the most beautiful synagogue that had been theirs since the temple of Solomon. This synagogue, Mendoza states, afterwards became the Convent of Santa Maria la Blanca (a statement which the architecture of Santa Maria la Blanca very flatly contradicts). He further informs us that they built another synagogue at Zamora, and that those who worshipped there always prided themselves—his point of view, of course, is narrowly Christian—that to them had been addressed St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.
They founded a university at Lucena (near Cordova), and schools where the law was taught, so that the holy Jewish religion spread rapidly, and was observed