Volume II Part 1 (1/2)
The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic.
Vol. 2.
by William H. Prescott.
PART FIRST. [CONTINUED.]
CHAPTER XII.
INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF THE KINGDOM.--INQUISITION IN ARAGON.
1483-1487.
Isabella enforces the Laws.--Punishment of Ecclesiastics.--Inquisition in Aragon.--Remonstrances of the Cortes.--Conspiracy.--a.s.sa.s.sination of the Inquisitor Arbues.--Cruel Persecutions.--Inquisition throughout Ferdinand's Dominions.
In such intervals of leisure as occurred amid their military operations, Ferdinand and Isabella were diligently occupied with the interior government of the kingdom, and especially with the rigid administration of justice, the most difficult of all duties in an imperfectly civilized state of society. The queen found especial demand for this in the northern provinces, whose rude inhabitants were little used to subordination. She compelled the great n.o.bles to lay aside their arms, and refer their disputes to legal arbitration. She caused a number of the fortresses, which were still garrisoned by the baronial banditti, to be razed to the ground; and she enforced the utmost severity of the law against such inferior criminals as violated the public peace. [1]
Even ecclesiastical immunities, which proved so effectual a protection in most countries at this period, were not permitted to screen the offender.
A remarkable instance of this occurred at the city of Truxillo, in 1486.
An inhabitant of that place had been committed to prison for some offence by order of the civil magistrate. Certain priests, relations of the offender, alleged that his religious profession exempted him from all but ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and, as the authorities refused to deliver him up, they inflamed the populace to such a degree, by their representations of the insult offered to the church, that they rose in a body, and, forcing the prison, set at liberty not only the malefactor in question, but all those confined there. The queen no sooner heard of this outrage on the royal authority, than she sent a detachment of her guard to Truxillo, which secured the persons of the princ.i.p.al rioters, some of whom were capitally punished, while the ecclesiastics, who had stirred up the sedition, were banished the realm. Isabella, while by her example she inculcated the deepest reverence for the sacred profession, uniformly resisted every attempt from that quarter to encroach on the royal prerogative. The tendency of her administration was decidedly, as there will be occasion more particularly to notice, to abridge the authority which that body had exercised in civil matters under preceding reigns. [2]
Nothing of interest occurred in the foreign relations of the kingdom, during the period embraced by the preceding chapter; except perhaps the marriage of Catharine, the young queen of Navarre, with Jean d'Albret, a French n.o.bleman, whose extensive hereditary domains, in the southwest corner of France, lay adjacent to her kingdom. This connection was extremely distasteful to the Spanish sovereigns, and indeed to many of the Navarrese, who were desirous of the alliance with Castile. This was ultimately defeated by the queen-mother, an artful woman, who, being of the blood royal of France, was naturally disposed to a union with that kingdom. Ferdinand did not neglect to maintain such an understanding with the malcontents of Navarre, as should enable him to counteract any undue advantage which the French monarch might derive from the possession of this key, as it were, to the Castilian territory. [3]
In Aragon, two circ.u.mstances took place in the period under review, deserving historical notice. The first relates to an order of the Catalan peasantry, denominated va.s.sals _de remenza_. These persons were subjected to a feudal bondage, which had its origin in very remote ages, but which had become in no degree mitigated, while the peasantry of every other part of Europe had been gradually rising to the rank of freemen. The grievous nature of the impositions had led to repeated rebellions in preceding reigns. At length, Ferdinand, after many fruitless attempts at a mediation between these unfortunate people and their arrogant masters, prevailed on the latter, rather by force of authority than argument, to relinquish the extraordinary seignorial rights, which they had hitherto enjoyed, in consideration of a stipulated annual payment from their va.s.sals. [4]
The other circ.u.mstance worthy of record, but not in like manner creditable to the character of the sovereign, is the introduction of the modern Inquisition into Aragon. The ancient tribunal had existed there, as has been stated in a previous chapter, since the middle of the thirteenth century, but seems to have lost all its venom in the atmosphere of that free country; scarcely a.s.suming a jurisdiction beyond that of an ordinary ecclesiastical court. No sooner, however, was the inst.i.tution organized on its new basis in Castile, than Ferdinand resolved on its introduction, in a similar form, in his own dominions.
Measures were accordingly taken to that effect in a meeting of a privy council convened by the king at Taracona, during the session of the cortes in that place, in April, 1484; and a royal order was issued, requiring all the const.i.tuted authorities throughout the kingdom to support the new tribunal in the exercise of its functions. A Dominican monk, Fray Gaspard Juglar, and Pedro Arbues de Epila, a canon of the metropolitan church, were appointed by the general, Torquemada, inquisitors over the diocese of Saragossa; and, in the month of September following, the chief justiciary and the other great officers of the realm took the prescribed oaths. [5]
The new inst.i.tution, opposed to the ideas of independence common to all the Aragonese, was particularly offensive to the higher orders, many of whose members, including persons filling the most considerable official stations, were of Jewish descent, and of course precisely the cla.s.s exposed to the scrutiny of the Inquisition. Without difficulty, therefore, the cortes was persuaded in the following year to send a deputation to the court of Rome, and another to Ferdinand, representing the repugnance of the new tribunal to the liberties of the nation, as well as to their settled opinions and habits, and praying that its operation might be suspended for the present, so far at least as concerned the confiscation of property, which it rightly regarded as the moving power of the whole terrible machinery. [6]
Both the pope and the king, as may be imagined, turned a deaf ear to these remonstrances. In the mean while the Inquisition commenced operations, and autos da fe were celebrated at Saragossa, with all their usual horrors, in the months of May and June, in 1485. The discontented Aragonese, despairing of redress in any regular way, resolved to intimidate their oppressors by some appalling act of violence. They formed a conspiracy for the a.s.sa.s.sination of Arbues, the most odious of the inquisitors established over the diocese of Saragossa. The conspiracy, set on foot by some of the princ.i.p.al n.o.bility, was entered into by most of the new Christians, or persons of Jewish extraction in the district. A sum of ten thousand reals was subscribed to defray the necessary expenses for the execution of their project. This was not easy, however, since Arbues, conscious of the popular odium that he had incurred, protected his person by wearing under his monastic robes a suit of mail, complete even to the helmet beneath his hood. With similar vigilance, he defended, also, every avenue to his sleeping apartment. [7]
At length, however, the conspirators found an opportunity of surprising him while at his devotions. Arbues was on his knees before the great altar of the cathedral, near midnight, when his enemies, who had entered the church in two separate bodies, suddenly surrounded him, and one of them wounded him in the arm with a dagger, while another dealt him a fatal blow in the back of his neck. The priests, who were preparing to celebrate matins in the choir of the church, hastened to the spot; but not before the a.s.sa.s.sins had effected their escape. They transported the bleeding body of the inquisitor to his apartment, where he survived only two days, blessing the Lord that he had been permitted to seal so good a cause with his blood. The whole scene will readily remind the English reader of the a.s.sa.s.sination of Thomas a Becket. [8]
The event did not correspond with the expectations of the conspirators.
Sectarian jealousy proved stronger than hatred of the Inquisition. The populace, ignorant of the extent or ultimate object of the conspiracy, were filled with vague apprehensions of an insurrection of the new Christians, who had so often been the objects of outrage; and they could only be appeased by the archbishop of Saragossa, riding through the streets, and proclaiming that no time should be lost in detecting and punis.h.i.+ng the a.s.sa.s.sins.
This promise was abundantly fulfilled; and wide was the ruin occasioned by the indefatigable zeal, with which the bloodhounds of the tribunal followed up the scent. In the course of this persecution, two hundred individuals perished at the stake, and a still greater number in the dungeons of the Inquisition; and there was scarcely a n.o.ble family in Aragon but witnessed one or more of its members condemned to humiliating penance in the autos da fe. The immediate perpetrators of the murder were all hanged, after suffering the amputation of their right hands. One, who had appeared as evidence against the rest, under a.s.surance of pardon, had his sentence so far commuted, that his hand was not cut off till after he had been hanged. It was thus that the Holy Office interpreted its promises of grace. [9]
Arbues received all the honors of a martyr. His ashes were interred on the spot where he had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. [10] A superb mausoleum was erected over them, and, beneath his effigy, a bas-relief was sculptured representing his tragical death, with an inscription containing a suitable denunciation of the race of Israel. And at length, when the lapse of nearly two centuries had supplied the requisite amount of miracles, the Spanish Inquisition had the glory of adding a new saint to the calendar, by the canonization of the martyr under Pope Alexander the Seventh, in 1664. [11]
The failure of the attempt to shake off the tribunal served only, as usual in such cases, to establish it more firmly than before. Efforts at resistance were subsequently, but ineffectually, made in other parts of Aragon, and in Valencia and Catalonia. It was not established in the latter province till 1487, and some years later in Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles. Thus Ferdinand had the melancholy satisfaction of riveting the most galling yoke ever devised by fanaticism, round the necks of a people, who till that period had enjoyed probably the greatest degree of const.i.tutional freedom which the world had witnessed.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, iii. lib. 1, cap. 10.--Pulgar, Reyes Catolicos, part. 3, cap. 27, 39, 67, et alibi.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 175.--Zurita, a.n.a.les, tom. iv. fol. 348.
[2] Pulgar, Reyes Catolicos, cap. 66.--A pertinent example of this occurred, December, 1485, at Alcala de Henares, where the court was detained during the queen's illness, who there gave birth to her youngest child, Dona Catalina, afterwards so celebrated in English history as Catharine of Aragon. A collision took place in this city between the royal judges and those of the archbishop of Toledo, to whose diocese it belonged. The later stoutly maintained the pretensions of the church. The queen with equal pertinacity a.s.serted the supremacy of the royal jurisdiction over every other in the kingdom, secular or ecclesiastical.