CHAPTER IV ISABELLA THE CATHOLIC

Llorente agrees with the earlier writers on the subject in considering the Spanish Inquisition as an institution distinct from that which had been established to deal with the Albigenses and their coevals in heresy. It is distinct only in that it represents a further development of the organization launched by Innocent III and perfected by Gregory IX.

Before entering upon the consideration of this Modern Inquisition—as it is called—it will perhaps be well to take a survey of the Spain of the Catholic Sovereigns—Ferdinand and Isabella—in whose reign that tribunal was set up in Castile.

For seven hundred years, with varying fortune and in varying degree, the Saracen had lorded it in the Peninsula.

First had come Berber Tarik, in 711, to overthrow the Visigothic Kingdom of Roderic, to spread the Moslem dominion as far as the mountains in the north and east and west from sea to sea. When the Berber tribe, the Syrians, and the Arabs had fallen to wrangling among themselves, Abdurrahman the Omayyad crossed from Africa to found the independent amirate, which in the tenth century became the Caliphate of Cordova.

Meanwhile the Christians had been consolidating their forces in the mountain fastnesses of the north to which they had been driven, and under Alfonso I they founded the Kingdom of Galicia. Thence, gradually but irresistibly, presenting a bold front to the Moorish conqueror, they forced their way down into the plains of Leon and Castile, so that by the following century they had driven the Saracens south of the Tagus. Following up their advantage, they continued to press them, intent upon driving them into the sea, and they might have succeeded but for the coming of Yusuf ben Techufin, who checked the Christian conquest, hurled them back across the Tagus, and, master of the country to the south of it, founded there the Empire of the Almoravides.

After these came the Almohades—the followers of the Mahdi—and the land rang for half a century with the clash of battle between Cross and Crescent, Castile, Leon, Aragon, and the new-born Kingdom of Portugal striving side by side to crush the common foe at Navas de Tolosa.

In 1236 Leon and Castile—now united into one kingdom—in alliance with Aragon, wrested Cordova from the Moors; in 1248 Seville was conquered, and in 1265 Diego of Aragon drove the Saracen from Murcia, and thereby reduced the Moslem occupation to Granada and a line of Mediterranean seaboard about Cadiz, in which they remained until Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, by virtue of their marriage, had united the two crowns on the death (in 1474) of Henry IV, Isabella’s brother.

Ferdinand brought, with Aragon, Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples; Isabella brought, with Castile, Leon and the rest of the Spanish territory, saving Granada and that portion of the coast still in Moorish hands. And thus was founded, by the welding of these several principalities into one single state, that mighty Kingdom of Spain which Columbus was so soon to enrich by a new world.

But though founded by this marriage, this kingdom still required consolidating and subjecting. Generations of misrule in Castile, culminating in the lax reigns of John II and Henry IV, had permitted the spread of a lawlessness so utter that its like was not to be found in any other state at that time. Anarchy was paramount mistress of the land, and Pulgar has left us a striking picture of the impossible conditions that prevailed.

“In those days,” he writes, “justice suffered, and was not to be done upon the malefactors who plundered and tyrannized in townships and on the highways. None paid debts who did not want to do so; none was restrained from committing any crime, and none dreamed of obedience or subjection to a superior. What with present and past wars, people were so accustomed to turbulence that he who did not do violence to others was held to be a man of no account.

Citizens, peasants, and men of peace were not masters of their own property, nor could they have recourse to any for redress of the wrongs they suffered at the hands of governors of fortresses and other thieves and robbers. Every man would gladly have engaged to give the half of his property if at that price he might have purchased security and peace for himself and his family. Often there was talk in towns and villages of forming brotherhoods to remedy all these evils. But a leader was wanting who should have at heart the justice and tranquillity of the Kingdom.”23

The nobility, as may be conceived—and, indeed, as Pulgar clearly indicates—were not only tainted with the general lawlessness, but were themselves the chief offenders, each man a law unto himself, a tyrannical, extortionate ruler of his vassals, lord of life and death, unscrupulously abusing his power, little better than a highway robber, caring nothing for the monarchy so long as the monarchy left him undisturbed, ready to rebel against it should it attempt to curtail his brigandage.

To crush these and other unruly elements in the state, to resolve into order the chaos that had invaded every quarter of the kingdom, was the task which at the outset the young Queen perceived awaiting her—a task that must have daunted any mind less virile, any spirit less vigorous.

And there were other and more pressing matters demanding her instant attention if she were to retain her seat upon this almost bankrupt throne of Castile which she had inherited from her brother.

Alfonso V of Portugal was in arms, invading her frontiers to dispute, on his niece Juana’s behalf, Isabella’s right.

Henry IV had left no legitimate issue, but his wife Juana of Portugal had brought forth in wedlock a daughter of whom she pretended that he was the father, whilst the King of Portugal, to serve interests of his own, recognized the girl as his legitimate niece. Public opinion, however, hesitated so little to proclaim her bastardy that it had named her La Beltraneja, after Beltran de la Cueva who notoriously had been her mother’s lover. And what Beltran de la Cueva, himself, thought about it, may be inferred from the circumstance that in the ensuing struggle he was found fighting for the honour of Castile under the banner of Queen Isabella.

The war demanded all the attention and resources of the Catholic Monarchs, and Isabella’s own share in these labours was conspicuous. They resulted in the rout of the Portuguese supporters of the pretender at Toro in 1476. By that victory Isabella was securely seated upon her throne and became joint ruler with Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon.

She was twenty-five years of age at the time, a fair, shapely woman of middle height, with a clear complexion, eyes between green and blue, and a gracious, winsome countenance remarkable for its habitual serenity. Such, indeed, was her self-control, Pulgar tells us, that not only did she carefully conceal her anger when it was aroused, but even in childbirth she could “dissemble her feelings, betraying no sign or expression of the pain to which all women are subject.” He adds that she was very ceremonious in dress and equipage, that she was deliberate of gesture, quick-witted, and ready of tongue, and that in the midst of the labour of government—and very arduous labour, as shall be seen—she found time to learn Latin, so that she could understand all that was said in that tongue.

“She was a zealous Catholic and very charitable, yet in her judgments she inclined rather to rigour than to mercy. She listened to counsel, but acted chiefly upon her own opinions. Of a rare fidelity to her word, she never failed to fulfil that to which she had pledged herself, save where compelled by stress of circumstance. She was reproached, together with her husband, of being wanting in generosity, because, seeing the royal patrimony diminished by the alienation of fiefs and castles, she was always very careful of such concessions.

“‘Kings,’ she was wont to say, ‘should preserve with care their dominions, because in alienating them they lose at once the money necessary to make themselves beloved and the power to make themselves feared.’”24

Such is the portrait that Pulgar has left us, and considering that he is writing of a sovereign, it would be no more than reasonable to suspect flattery and that curious, undiscriminating enthusiasm which never fails to create panegyrists when it is a question of depicting a prince, however inept, to his contemporaries. But if Pulgar has erred in this instance, it has been on the side of moderation in his portrayal of this gifted, high-spirited woman.

Her actions speak more eloquently of her character than can the pen of any chronicler, and it is in the deeds of princes that we must seek their true natures, not in what may have been written of them in their own day. The deeds of Isabella’s life—with one dark exception that is the subject of this history—more than bear out all that Pulgar and others have set down in praise of her.

No sooner had she overthrown those who came from abroad to dispute her right to the crown than she turned her attention to the subjugation of those who disputed her authority at home. In this herculean labour she had the assistance of Alonzo de Quintanilla, her chancellor, and Juan Ortega, the King’s sacristan. These men proposed to organize at their own risk one of those brotherhoods which Pulgar mentions as having been so ardently desired by the country for its protection from those who preyed upon it. This hermandad was to act under royal sanction and guidance, with the object of procuring peace and protection of property in the kingdom. Isabella readily approved the proposal, and the brotherhood was immediately founded, a tax to support it being levied upon those in whose interest it was established, and very willingly paid by them.

Splendidly organized, this association, half military, half civil, so effectively discharged the functions for which it was created, that twenty years later—in 1498—it was possible to abolish it, and to replace it by a much simpler and less costly system of police which then sufficed to preserve the order that had been restored.

Further to subject the turbulent and insubordinate nobility, Isabella employed methods similar to those adopted in like case by her neighbour, Louis XI of France. She bestowed the offices of state upon men of merit without regard to birth, which hitherto had been accounted the only qualification. The career of the law was thrown open to the burgher classes, and every office under the crown was made accessible to lawyers, who thus became the staunch friends of the sovereign.

If the nobles did not dare to revolt, at least they protested in the strongest terms against these two innovations that so materially affected and weakened their prestige. They represented in particular that the institution of the hermandad was the manifestation of a want of confidence in the “faithful nobility,” and they implored that four members of their order should be appointed by the Catholic Sovereigns to form a council of supreme direction of the affairs of State, as under the late King Henry IV.

To this the Catholic Sovereigns replied that the hermandad was a tutelary institution which was very welcome to the country, and which it was their pleasure to maintain. As for the offices of State, it was for the sovereigns to appoint such men as they considered best qualified to hold them. The nobles, they added, were free to remain at Court or to withdraw to their own domains, as they might see fit; but as for the sovereigns, themselves, as long as it should please God to preserve them in the high position in which He had deigned to place them, it should be their care not to imitate the monarch who was cited to them as an example, and not to become puppets in the hands of their “faithful nobility.”

That answer gave the nobles pause. It led them to perceive that a change had taken place, and that the lawless days of Henry IV were at an end. To have made them realize this was something. But there was more to be done before they would understand that they must submit to the altered conditions, and Isabella pursued the policy she had adopted with an unswerving directness, as the following story from Pulgar’s Chronicle bears witness:

A quarrel had broken out in the Queen’s palace at Valladolid between Don Fadrique Enriquez (son of the Admiral of Castile) and Don Ramiro de Guzman. Knowledge of it reached the Queen, and she ordered both disputants to hold themselves under arrest in their own quarters until she should provide that judgment be given between them by the Courts. Fadrique, however, signified his contempt of the royal mandate by disobeying it and continuing at large. Learning this, Isabella gave the more obedient Guzman his liberty, and the assurance of her word that he should suffer no harm.

A few days later he was riding peacefully through the street, secure in the Queen’s safe-conduct, when he was set upon by three masked horsemen of the household of Fadrique and severely beaten. No sooner did the Queen hear of this further affront to her authority than she got to horse, and rode through torrential rain from Valladolid to the Admiral’s castle at Simancas. In fact, in such haste did she set out that she rode alone, without waiting for an escort. This, however, followed presently, but did not come up with her save under the very walls of the Admiral’s fortress.

She summoned the Admiral, and commanded him to deliver up his rebellious son to her justice, and when Don Alonso Enriquez protested that his son was not there, she bade her followers search the castle from battlements to dungeons. The search, however, proved fruitless, and Isabella returned empty-handed and indignant to Valladolid. Arrived there, she took to her bed, and to those who came to seek news of her health, she replied: “My body aches with the blows delivered yesterday against my safe-conduct by Don Fadrique.”

The Admiral, trembling before the royal wrath, resolved to deliver up his son and cast him upon the mercy of the Queen. So the Constable of Castile—Fadrique’s uncle—undertook the office of intercessor. He went with Don Fadrique to Valladolid, and imploring Isabella to consider that the young man was but in his twentieth year and that he had sinned through the rashness of youth, begged her to do upon him the justice she might wish or the mercy that was due.

The Queen, however, was not to be moved to mercy for offences that set her royal authority in contempt. She was inexorable. She refused to see the offender, and submitted him to the indignity of being taken to prison through the streets of the city by an alcalde. After a spell of confinement there she banished him to Sicily, prohibiting his return to Spain under pain of severest punishment.

It happened, however, that Don Ramiro de Guzman did not consider his honour sufficiently avenged by his enemy’s exile. One night, when the Court was at Medina del Campo, he ambushed himself in his turn with some followers of his own, and attacked the Admiral, to return him the blows received from his son. From this indignity the Admiral was saved by his escort. But when Isabella heard of the affair, she treated Guzman as a rebel, seized his castles in Leon and Castile, as she would have seized his person, but that to escape her anger he fled to Portugal for shelter.25

No less determined was her conduct in the matter of the Grand-Mastership of Santiago.

There were in Spain three religio-military orders: the Knights of Alcantara, the celibate Knights of Calatrava—who were the successors of the Knights Templars—and the Knights of Santiago. This last order had been founded for the purpose of affording protection to the pilgrims who came into Spain to visit the shrine at Compostella of St. James the Apostle, who is alleged to have been the first to bear the message of Christianity into the Iberian Peninsula.26 These pilgrimages, chiefly from France, were a great source of revenue to the country, and it became of importance to ensure their immunity from the predatory hordes that infested the highways. Further, the Knights of Santiago had found employment for their arms in the crusade waged on Spanish soil against the Moors, in token whereof they wore the Crusader’s cross in red upon their white cloaks. They acquired great power and wealth, possessing castles and convents in every part of Spain, so that the office of Grand Master of the Order was one of great weight and importance—too great, in the opinion of Isabella, to be in the hands of a subject.

This opinion she boldly manifested in 1476, when the death of Don Rodrigo Manrique left the office vacant. She took horse, as was her custom, and rode to Huete, where the Chapter of the Order was assembled upon the business of the necessary election, and she frankly urged that to an office so exalted it was not fitting that any but the King should be elected.

The proposal was not received with satisfaction. Ferdinand was an Aragonese, and despite the union of the two kingdoms which must be completed when he should succeed to the throne of Aragon, he was still looked upon as a foreigner by the Castilians. Under Isabella’s insistence, however, a compromise was effected. The Chapter consented to elect Ferdinand to the office of Grand-Master on condition that he should nominate a gentleman of Castile to act as his deputy for the discharge of the duties of the position. This was done, and Alonso de Cardenas—a loyal servant of the Sovereigns—was chosen as the royal deputy. Thus Isabella established it that the appointment of Grand-Master of the Order of Santiago should be a royal prerogative.

Even more strikingly than in either of the instances cited does the Queen’s resolute, spirited nature manifest itself in her manner of dealing with a revolt that took place in Segovia at the commencement of her reign.

During the war with Portugal the Catholic Sovereigns had entrusted their eldest daughter, the Princess Isabella, to the care of Andrés de Cabrera, the Seneschal of the Castle of Segovia, and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla.

Cabrera, a man of stern and rigid equity, had occasion to depose his lieutenant, Alonso Maldonado, from his office, conferring this upon his own brother-in-law, Pedro de Bobadilla. Maldonado conspired to avenge himself. He begged Bobadilla’s permission to remove some stones that were in the castle, upon the pretext that he required them for his own house, and he sent some men of his own to fetch them. These men, who were secretly armed, having gained admission, stabbed the sentry and seized the person of Bobadilla, whilst Maldonado, with other of his people, took possession of the castle itself. The inmates of the Alcazar, hearing the uproar, fled to the Homenaje Tower, taking with them the Infanta, who was five years of age at the time. Fortified in this, they defied Maldonado when he attacked it. Finding it impregnable, the rebel ordered Bobadilla to be brought forward, and threatened the besieged that unless they admitted him he would put the prisoner to death.

To this threat Cabrera’s dignified reply was that Maldonado must do as he pleased, but the gates would not be opened to him.

By this time a multitude of the townspeople had gathered there, alarmed by the disturbance and armed for any emergency. To these Maldonado cunningly represented that what he was about was being done in their interests against the overbearing tyranny of the Governor, and he invited them to join hands with him in the cause of liberty to complete the work he had so excellently begun. The populace largely took sides with him, so that Segovia was flung into a state of war. There was constant fighting in the streets, and the gates were in the hands of the rebels, with the exception of that of St. John, which was held for Cabrera.

It is believed that it was Maria de Bobadilla herself who, stealing undetected from the Alcazar, escaped from Segovia and bore to the Queen the news of what was taking place, and the consequent peril of the royal child.

Upon learning this, Isabella instantly repaired to Segovia. The leaders of the rebellion had news of her approach, but dared not carry their insubordination to the length of closing the gates against her. They went so far, however, as to ride out to meet her and to attempt to deny admittance to her followers; and her counsellors, seeing the humour of the populace, urged her to be prudent and to accede to their wishes. But her proud spirit flared up under that cautious advice.

“Learn,” she cried, “that I am Queen of Castile, that this city is mine, and that no conditions are to be imposed upon me before I enter it. I shall enter, then, and with me all those whom I may judge necessary for my service.”

With that she ordered her escort forward, and entered the city by a gate that was held by her partisans, and so won through to the Alcazar.

Thither flocked the infuriated mob, and thundered at the gates, demanding admission.

The Queen, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the Cardinal of Spain and the Count of Benavente, who were with her, ordered the gates to be thrown open and as many admitted as the place would hold. The populace surged into the courtyard, clamouring for the Seneschal. To meet them came the slight, fair young queen, alone and fearless, and when in their astonishment they had fallen silent—

“People of Segovia,” she calmly addressed them, “what do you seek?”

Dominated by her serenity, awed by her majesty, their fury fell from them. Humbly now they urged their grievance against Cabrera, accusing him of oppression, and imploring of the Queen’s grace his demission.

Instantly she promised them that their request should be granted; whereupon the revulsion was complete, and the mob that but a few moments earlier had been yelling threats and execrations now raised their voices loyally to acclaim her.

She commanded them to return to their homes and their labours, and to leave the administration of justice in her hands, sending her their ambassadors to prefer their complaint against Cabrera, which she would investigate.

As she commanded so it was done, and when she had examined the accusations against the Seneschal and satisfied herself that they were groundless, she announced him free from guilt and reinstated him in his office, the conquered people bowing submissively to her ruling.27

In 1477 Isabella moved into Andalusia, in which province, as elsewhere, law and order had ceased to exist. She entered Seville with the proclaimed intention of demanding an account of the guilty. But at the very rumour of her approach and the business upon which she came, some thousands of the inhabitants whose consciences were uneasy made haste to depart the city.

Alarmed by this depopulation, the Sevillans implored the Queen to sheathe the sword of justice, representing that after the bloody affrays that for years had been afflicting the district there was scarcely a family in which some member was not answerable to the law.

Isabella, gentle and merciful by nature—which renders her association with the Inquisition the more deplorable—lent an ear to these representations, and granted an amnesty for all crimes committed since the death of Henry IV. But she was not so lenient with those who had prostituted the justice which they administered in her name. Informed of the judges who were making a trade and extortion of their judgments, she punished them by deposition, and herself fixed the scale of legal costs to be observed in future.

Finding a mass of impending law-suits which the misrule of the past years had put upon the province, she directed her attention to clearing up this Augean stable. Every Friday, attended by her Council, she sat in the great hall of the Alcazar of Seville to hear the plaints of the most humble of her subjects; and so earnestly and vigorously did she go to work that in two months she had disposed of litigations that might have dragged on for years.

Upon her accession she had found the royal treasury exhausted by the inept administration of the last two reigns and the prodigal, reckless grants that Henry IV and Juan II had made to the nobles. This condition of things had seriously embarrassed the Catholic Sovereigns, and they had been driven to various expedients to raise the requisite funds for the war with Portugal. Now that the war was at an end, they found themselves without the means necessary to maintain the royal state.

Isabella made a close investigation of the grants that had been made by her brother and father, and she cancelled all those that were the fruit of caprice and wantonness, restoring to the Crown the revenues that had been recklessly alienated and the taxes that the country had hitherto paid to none but the bandits who oppressed it.

Similarly she found the public credit entirely ruined. Under the late king such had been the laxity, that in three years no less than 150 public mints had been authorized, and this permitted such abuses that a point had been reached where it almost seemed that every Spaniard minted his own money, or that, as Rosseeuw St. Hilaire puts it, “coining was the country’s chief industry.”

Photo by Alinari.

POPE INNOCENT III. AND ST. DOMINIC.
From a Fresco in the Church of the Sacro Speco, Subiaco.

She reduced the number of mints to five, and exercised the severest control over their output, thereby liberating trade from the fear of fraud that had been stifling it. An increased and steadily increasing prosperity was the almost immediate result of this wise measure.

Having restored order in the country, she turned her attention to the Court, applied herself to the purification of its morals, and set about converting it from the disgusting licence that had prevailed in her brother’s time.

Herself of a rigid chastity, she exacted the same purity of conduct in all the women who approached her, and she submitted the noble damsels brought up at her Court to the very strictest surveillance. Loving the King very sincerely, she was notoriously inclined to jealousy: let him but look too assiduously upon any lady of her train, and Isabella found a way to remove her from the Court. She saw to it that the pages who were in waiting upon her should be given a good education, that thus they might avoid the idleness which unfailingly leads to waste of character and to immorality. Finally, according to Bernaldez,28 she extended her moral reforms to the convents, which were no less in need of them than the Court, and she corrected and punished the great depravity that was permeating all conventual orders.29

There is no chronicler of her reign who does not dilate upon her great piety. Bernaldez compares her to St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine,30 and describes her as very devoted to the Holy Faith and very obedient to Holy Church. Bernaldez, of course, was writing after the establishment of the Inquisition, of which he, in common with other contemporary and subsequent chroniclers, very warmly approved; and he may have been very largely influenced by consideration of the support which she had unfortunately lent to its introduction into Castile. But that her piety was extreme and sincere we infer from the moment that we see her, after the battle of Toro, which definitely gave her the crown, going barefoot to church to a service of thanksgiving.

Yet, however ardent her piety, it would not carry her the length of recognizing in the Pope the temporal over-lord of Castile.

From the thirteenth century the power of the Church had been increasing in Spain under the dogma of the spiritual sovereignty of Rome over all the Catholic churches of the world. The clergy had amassed enormous wealth with that facility so peculiarly their own when the occasion is afforded them, and to this end they had abused the reckless, foolish liberality of Isabella’s predecessors.

Lucius Marinæus informs us that the incomes of the four archbishoprics—Toledo, Santiago, Seville, and Granada—amounted to 134,000 ducats,31 whilst those of the twenty bishoprics came to some 250,000 ducats.

Surrounded as she was by priestly counsellors whom she respected, she nevertheless manifested plainly her impatience of the clerical usurpation of the rights of the Crown. The chief of these abuses was no doubt that practised by the Pontiff himself, in conferring upon foreigners the highest and richest benefices of the Church of Spain, ignoring that it was the prerogative of the Crown to name the bishops—always subject to papal confirmation. That Isabella, devout and priest-surrounded as she was, should have dared to oppose the Holy See and the terrible Pope Sixtus IV, as fearlessly as she had opposed her predatory nobles, is perhaps the highest proof that history can yield of her strength of character.

Her smouldering indignation flared out when the Pope, ignoring her nomination of her chaplain, Alonzo de Burgos, to the vacant bishopric of Cuenca, appointed his own nephew, Raffaele Riario, Cardinal of San Sisto, to that vacant see.

Twice already had she sought the pontiff’s confirmation of nominees of her own for other benefices—the Archbishopric of Saragoza and the Bishopric of Tarragona—and on each occasion her nominee had been set aside in favour of a creature of the Pope’s. But this third contemptuous disregard of her prerogative was more than her patience could endure. The Catholic Sovereigns refused to ratify the appointment of Riario, and begged the Pope—submissively at first—to cancel it.

But the harsh, overbearing Sixtus returned an answer characteristic of his arrogant nature. It was his, he announced, to distribute at his pleasure all the benefices of Christendom; and he condescended to explain that the power which it had pleased God to confer upon him on earth could not be limited by any will but his own, and that it was governed only by the interests of the Catholic Faith, of which he was the sole arbiter.

But his stubbornness met a stubbornness as great. The Catholic Sovereigns replied by withdrawing their ambassador from the Papal Court, and issuing an injunction to all Spanish subjects to leave Rome.

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.