Torquemada built the Inquisition on a national foundation of bigotry and cruelty. As early as the seventh century the ecclesiastical synods were practically parliaments of the realm as well as councils of the church (Milman, “Latin Christianity,” London, 1854, I., 380) The early laws against heresy were more harsh in Spain than in any other country in Europe (ibid., I., 381). “In Spain,” says Buckle, “the theological element became not so much a component of the national character, but rather the character itself” (“Civilization,” ii., 14). This shows again how vain it is to claim that the horrors of the Inquisition in Spain should be debited to other causes than Christian bigotry. Philip II, who reigned for more than forty years from 1555, said that “it is better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics,” and the Spanish people zealously helped him put the precept into practice. The Protestant Reformation, which convulsed the nations of Northern Europe, was very soon racked and burned out of Spain. The superstitious people clung to the Inquisition in spite of the attempts of enlightened monarchs and ministries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to abolish it. The church had done its work thoroughly - it had poisoned the very well-springs of law and progress.
        The Spanish inquisitorial court appointed by Ferdinand and Isabella began its work by the issuance of an edict (Jan. 2, 1481) giving directions regarding the arrest of heretics. Within four days six persons had been burned; by November, 278 had perished in the autos-da-fe at Seville. Soon 2,000 were burned, many more burned in effigy, and 17,000 suffered lesser punishments, such as imprisonment for life, confiscation, and exile. Torquemada was appointed in 1483, and he rapidly organized the Inquisition throughout Spain, especially at Seville, Cordova, Jaca, and Ciudad Real. The victims were principally nominally Christianized Jews. He ruled for eighteen years. In that time between 9,000 and 10,000 were burned alive, and 7,000 in effigy, while about 100,000 were punished in other ways (ibid.). To this number should be added those tortured to extort confessions, but who were acquitted for lack of evidence. These were the direct victims; the indirect were, of course, vastly greater in number, including the families of the slain and imprisoned, who suffered inexpressible mental agonies and were thrown out penniless in a land of savage enemies. “Diego de Deza, a Dominican friar, the friend of Columbus, archbishop of Seville, Ferdinands confessor, and the preceptor of his son, John, succeeded Torquemada as grand inquisitor (1449)....An insurrection excited by the extreme measures of the inquisitors led to his removal (1507). Under his administration 1,664 were burned alive, 832 in effigy, and 32,456 punished in other ways (ibid., referring to Herzog, Real-Ency., xviii., 332). Cardinal Francis Ximenes de Cisneros was the third inquisitor-general (1507-17). "In those ten years Llorente (iv., 255, ed. 1818) computes that 2, 536 were burned alive, 1,368 in effigy, and 47,263 were punished in other ways" (ibid.). This number includes those who suffered in the Inquisition in Aragon, which was not under Ximenes' jurisdiction. "The Inquisition in Spain long maintained its original vigor. Philip II (1555-98) used it with effect in the crushing out of Protestantism" (ibid.). Of some of the effects of this work Prescott ("Ferdinand and Isabella," ii., 450), says: "The tear of sympathy, wrung out by the sight of mortal agonies, was an offense to be expiated by humiliating penance. The most frightful maxims were deliberately engrafted into the code of morals. Any one, it is said, might conscientiously kill all apostates wherever he could meet him. There was some doubt whether he could meet him. There was some doubt whether a man might slay his own father, if a heretic or Infidel, but none whatever as to his right, in that event, to take away the life of his son or of his brother. These maxims were not a dead letter, but in the most active operation, as the sad records of the dread tribunal too well prove."
        In the admonition of the apostle Paul to the Corinthians, to "purge out the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump," and in his instruction to "deliver such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus," justification for the establishment of the Inquisition is believed to reside. There is no evil thing for which precedent cannot be found in the Old or the New Testament. The inquisitor professed to find such precedent in both Testaments. One Luis de Paramo, cited by Dr. Jose Bermudez, author of the "Triumphs of the Peruvian Holy Office," declares that "God was the first inquisitor," and proceeds to the demonstration as follows: First, he says, Adam was cited - "Adam ubi es - Adam, where art thou?" teaching thus to all future tribunals of the Holy Inquisition that where the summons is wanted the process is null and void. Adam presented himself, and God began his interrogations, judging the criminal by himself and in secret. (Who else was there to hear?) Exactly the same form followed the inquisitors, having taken it from God himself. The dress of skins which God made for Adam and Eve, says Paramo, is notoriously the pattern of the sanbenito which they put upon the condemned heretics. The crosses that were figured upon it in the beginning were straight, but immediately they became inclined, taking the form of that of St. Andrew, to indicate that those who bear them have wandered from the rectitude of the faith of Christ. The, God having clothed Adam in this dress of infamy, figuring that man by his sin has made himself like the beasts, he expelled him from the terrestrial paradise; and from this is derived the custom of the Inquisition in confiscating the property of the heretics. The propriety of this custom, Paramo argues, cannot be doubted, for does not Plato say that without virtue the goods of the earth are pernicious for their possessors, being an incitement for their passions and instruments of their crimes? Finally, concludes this defender of the Inquisition, "Adam was likewise deprived of the command he had over the brutes. From this is deduced that the heretic loses all natural rights, civil and political, that his children cease to be under his dominion, his slaves become free of his control, and his vassals released from the obedience which before was his due."
Another panegyrist of the Inquisition, the Rev. Father Macedo (1676), traces the divine origin of the Holy Office still farther and higher, for he declares that the expulsion of Lucifer from heaven was the first recorded auto-da-fe!
        When the last avowed Jew of Mahammedan had been eliminated from Spain by the Edict of Expulsion, or had become an avowed Christian through the process of conversion and baptism, it might be supposed that the work of bigotry was finished in that country. On the contrary, it was only fairly under way.
Of the 235,000 Jews in the kingdom 165,000 had emigrated, 50,000 submitted to baptism, and 20,000 suffered death. In the experiences of the emigrants it would seem that the sum of human misery had been reached. "For some of them," wrote Rabbi Joseph, whose father was one of the exiles, "the Turks killed to take out the gold which they had swallowed to hide it; some of them hunger and the plague consumed, and some of them were cast naked by the captains on the isles of the sea; and some of them were sold for men-servants and maid-servants in Genoa and its villages, and some of them were cast into the sea… For there were among those who were cast into the isles of the sea upon Provence a Jew and his old father fainting from hunger, for there was no one to break unto him in a strange country. And the man went and sold his son for bread to restore the soul of the old man. And it came to pass, when he returned to his old father, that he found him fallen down dead; and he rent his clothes. And he returned unto the baker to take his son, and the baker would not give him back; and he cried out with a loud a bitter cry for his son, and there was none to deliver." They were learning what it was to live in a world that served its redeemer by persecuting the people of his race.
        Penniless, friendless, and despised, the expatriated Jew probably thought that he was suffering the limit; but worse befell his brethren who had chosen conversion to exile. Bigotry had robbed him of home and country, but it left him freedom of belief except in so far as it was curtailed by his own rabbis. The converted Jew in Spain had surrendered that, and was to lose the rest.
        The king of Spain had sworn to purge the land of Infidels and Jews, and his Christian contemporaries applauded him for the fidelity with which he kept his oath; he had never agreed to persecute professed Catholics, so that with the disappearance of Jews and Mohammedans the business of heretic-hunting, so congenial and profitable to the wolves of the church, was threatened with stagnation. All of the Jews, remaining within his domain had been baptized, which to a reasonably Catholic monarch would have appeared all that was necessary. To the New Christians, also, it may have looked like the final consummation. The church took a different view. Although no means were taken to instruct in the Catholic faith the recruits whom it had baptized by thousands, the church found grounds for complaint in the fact that the "Conversos" exhibited only a nominal adherence to Catholicism, neither causing their children to be baptized nor observing the fasts and ordinances of the church. It was found, too, that, as New Christians, the Jews were as thrifty as they had been before the conversion, and got together property in a way that excited the envy and cupidity of born Catholics. In a corrupt monarchy and church, their wealth enabled them to hold high civil and ecclesiastical offices.
        The Inquisition, not at first officially established in Castile by imperial fiat, saw fat picking among these wealthy converts. Naturally one of the first appeals was made to race hatred. Fray Alonso de Espina, to whom is ascribed a large share in organizing persecution in Spain, aroused public excitement against the Jews by his sermons, in one of which he cried out: "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." De Espina fostered the belief among the ignorant that the Jews murdered Christian children, and when in 1454 a child was robbed and murdered at Valladolid and the body scratched up by dogs, 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. A confession of certain Jews was obtained by torture, but the magistrates rejected the testimony so extorted, and they escaped.
        This De Espina, though a man distinguished for learning, had a gift for lying that made him the Munchausen of the pulpit. To stimulate hatred for the Jews he raked together, from the chronicles of all Europe, the fabulous stories of their slaying Christian children in their unholy rites, of their poisoning wells and fountains, of their starting conflagrations, and of all other horrible acts that would make them abhorred; adding that the Jewish law commands them to slay Christians and to despoil them whenever practicable - a law which they obey, he asserts, with quenchless hatred and insatiable thirst for revenge. But his boldest flight was his picture of the coming of Antichrist, with the Jews for his supporters. Alexander the Great, he declared, shut the Jews up in the mountains of the Caspian, adjoining the realms of the Great Khan 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 their promised messiah and will worship him as their God, and with their united aid he will overrun the earth. By such imposture as this was a healthy dislike for the Jews created and the way for the Inquisition prepared; for the priest never failed to declare that the New Christians, the Conversos, or converted Jews, were insincere and still practiced in secret their horrid rites. The people responded with an occasional massacre of the Jews.
        The establishment of the Inquisition as a coordinate branch of the Spanish government was not effected without resistance. Its enemies, the Judaizing Christians, were many and strenuous. The inquisitors in the fifteenth century set themselves up at Seville, first at the convent of San Pablo, which speedily became too small to hold its many prisoners, and then in the great fortress of Triana, the stronghold of the city, whose enormous dimensions and numberless dungeons fitted it for the purposes of the religious bandits and plunderers. On the establishment of the Inquisition as an imperial affair, the leading citizens of Seville, headed by a wealthy Christian convert from Judaism, called a meeting and organized a vigilance committee of a hundred men whose duty it should be to slay the inquisitors on making their first arrest. How salutary the work of such a committee might have proved was never learned; for it happened that a daughter of the leader of the plot was mistress to one of the Christian inquisitors, and that she betrayed her father to her lover - an act equivalent to sending him to the stake. As a result the most important members of the committee were arrested, conveyed to the fortress of Triana, and brought out to be the central figures of the spectacle called an auto-da-fe. The father of the girl was burned in the second auto. The triumph of the Inquisition in this initial combat encouraged its promoters to such an extent that they constructed in the Campo del Tablada a "brasero", or burning-place, whose foundations were so massively laid that they can be traced to this day, although that was in the year of grace 1481. the victory was followed by an exodus from Seville of converted Jews numbering upwards of eight thousand, but 300 stayed to perish by fire.