It has to be admitted with regret that this decree whereby Sixtus threw down the gage of battle to Ferdinand was simply a tactical move, vulgarly denominated a bluff. It served two purposes; it apprised Ferdinand that its author must be placated in some way if the Inquisition of Aragon was to be carried on, and it filled the pockets of His Holiness with Converso money. Ferdinand treated it almost with indifference, but condescended to reply, pointing out that the pope's attempt to run an inquisition in Aragon without his assistance had resulted in the spread of heresy, and now his management must be left to royal hands.
        The inquisitors, indeed, from their point of view, had a genuine grievance against the popes. This was the venal protection the pontiffs extended to rich heretics, whereby the holy tribunal was defrauded of its victims and the confiscations. Ferdinand, too, when he saw the fortunes of his victims thus put beyond his rapacious grasp, awoke to the fact that he was being robbed, and besides addressing warning letters to his holiness at Rome, he promulgated by ordinance that any person, lay or ecclesiastical, who should make use of a papal indulgence to evade the jurisdiction of the Holy Office should be summarily put to death and his property confiscated to the crown. The popes, however, continued to sell exemptions from inquisitorial penalties to everyone with the means to pay for them, but the satisfied the king and his harpies of the Inquisition by informing them that they might treat his briefs as of no effect as regards the bodies and goods of the purchasers and holders of them, as his indulgences were spiritual and pertained only to their immortal souls! Thus by theological trickery and fraud the Vatican prolonged its rich harvest, while the purchasers of its bulls, on returning to Spain, were burnt by the Holy Office, and the goods they had not disposed of to pay the pope passed into the possession of the king and queen.
        The Inquisition went on as before. Ferdinand had put his inquisitors on salary, and took all the confiscations himself. The Pope, who, as stated, had never intended that the humane provisions of his bull should go into effect, soon wrote that he was willing to consider the amending of his bull, and meanwhile suspended it so far as it convened the common law, the said common law being the traditional inquisitorial system. The only matter left to be adjusted was the division of the spoils. Says Lea: "Thus the unfortunate Conversos of Aragon…were merely used as pawns in the pitiless game of king and pope over their despoilment; and the merciful prescriptions of the bull of April 18 were only of service in showing that, in his subsequent policy, Sixtus sinned against light and knowledge." He knew how the Conversos ought to be treated, if they were to be prosecuted at all, and he had taken their money in payment for a decree in their favor; and then he bargained with the king for a share of the property wrested from them by methods as atrocious as those practiced by pirates on the high seas.
        An Inquisition was set up in Valencia in 1484. pressure from the throne overcame popular resistance and brought the little kingdom completely under the yoke. In four years the tribunal claimed a thousand victims. In a list of 983 reconciled, one hundred women are described as the wives or daughters of men who had been burned. As the Inquisition made a specialty of dealing with wealthy heretics, the dimensions of the sum which the sufferers contributed to its treasury may be imaged. The king had placed the royal palace at the disposal of the inquisitors and built for them the dungeons needed for the nefarious purposes of the Holy Office.
        At this time the Conversos of Aragon, who felt themselves to be in danger of the Inquisition, began silently leaving the kingdom, which movement coming to the notice of Ferdinand he ordered the authorities to adopt whatever means might be necessary to prevent the departure of all who were not firm in the faith. As there was no law by which this might be done, he instructed the Inquisitors to issue an edict forbidding anyone to leave the kingdom without their license under pain of being held as relapsed heretics in case of return. By this act was the Inquisition placed above the law, and it was held by the king that, being a spiritual power, the enforcement of its edicts did not therefore infringe on the liberties of the kingdom which the secular law had established!
        In the last decade of the nineteenth century Judge Brewer of the United States Supreme Court, in deciding that the alien contract law did not apply to ministers of the gospel, remarked that it could never have been the intention of our law-makers to enact any statute that would stand in the way of the spread of the Christian religion. In defending the enforcement of the inquisitorial edict against the emigration of New Christians Ferdinand put forward a similar contention. "It is not to be imagined," he says, "that vassals so Catholic as those of Aragon would have demanded, or that kings so Catholic would have granted, fueros and liberties adverse to the faith and favourable to heresy." The American judge and the Spanish king came together on the point that t the Christian religion is paramount to all law and all human rights. Ferdinand would not have objected so decidedly to the Conversos quitting the jurisdiction of the Inquisition if they had not carried with them property of which it was the function of that tribunal to relieve them in favor of the royal purse.
        The inhabitants of Teruel, a fortified city of Aragon near the border of Castile, were somewhat open in their hostility to the Holy Office. When a brace of inquisitors were disengaged form a neighboring tribunal and sent there to set up an inquisition they were met at the gates by the magistrates and told that they could not come in. Teruel had already in its midst more of their breed than it wanted. The holy men thereupon withdrew to Cella, a village ten miles away, and thence shot at Teruel an edict excommunicating the magistrates. They also plastered the town with and interdict, which meant a suspension of church privileges. But if one priest could excommunicate, another could absolve; if one could lay and interdict, another could lift it. At no large cost a letter was procured form the pope, by virtue of which two resident clergymen turned the trick whereby the excommunication and interdiction of the town became as nought, and the people of Teruel went about their business. Ferdinand, waxing wroth, ordered that the two local priest be seized and held in chains, but nobody executed the order. The town was also commanded to submit under pain of such punishment as should make it a perpetual warning to the disobedient. All this produced no present effect on the hardened Teruelites. The Inquisition took a hand, and on October 2, 1484, fulminated a decree confiscating to the crown all the offices in Teruel and pronouncing the present incumbents incapable of holding any office of honor and profit. Ferdinand executed the inquisitorial decree by stopping the salaries of the Teruel officials. They declined to conform. When as a final action the Inquisition invoked the aid of the secular arm and called on the king for a sufficient force to seize the magistrates and confiscate their property. In matters of this kind the property was never overlooked. The victims had to furnish the cost of the inquisitorial process. The church, the prelates, and the rich Catholics were all in favor of the Inquisition, but, as Guido Fulcodio put it, they were afflicted with constipation of the pocket when it came to paying the expenses.
        Ferdinand responded to the summons of the Inquisition by an address to the officials of Aragon ordering them and the nobles to assemble all the horse and foot they could raise and put them at the services of the Inquisition. He would himself send a captain to take command. He would himself escape the royal wrath, deprivation of office, a fine of twenty thousand gold florins, and such other penalties as it might please the king to impose, they must seize all of the inhabitants of Teruel, and their property, and deliver them to the Inquisition to be punished for their enormous crimes - which "crimes" consisted in holding their gates against the two inquisitors sent to set up in their city a slaughter house for heretics. The people of the village of Cella were at the same time ordered by the king to give the inquisitors their castle for a robbers' roost, and to make all repairs necessary to its use as such, which meant the construction of dungeons and torture chambers. The Aragon officials and nobles evinced no enthusiasm for the discreditable job. They knew that delivering the Teruel people to the inquisitors entailed robbery, torture, and the stake for the men, and the same, plus outrage, for the women. Having the interests of their fellow countrymen in view, they thought it better to let them enjoy their heresies and take their chances with the fiends of hell.
        Not until Ferdinand had defied the fundamental laws of Spain which forbade the introduction of foreign troops into the kingdom, and drafted and army from Cuenca and Castile for the subjugation of the city, did the people of Teruel submit to the impositions of the inquisitors. Ferdinand placed over them a governor absolved form all obligation to respect any rights or privileges, and under orders form the king to banish all whom the inquisitors might designate. This placed the whole population at the mercy of the Holy Office, to be imprisoned, tortured, robbed, or exiled, for the Inquisition had full discretion regarding the fate of all citizens who had impeded its ingress and establishment. To reconcile the surrounding country to the sacking of Teruel, the inquisitors guaranteed the remission of all debts and rents which might be due to heretics who should be convicted and subjected to confiscation in that city. The guarantee rendered the dishonest debtor class eager for the success of the inquisitors and the punishment of heresy among the prosperous New Christians of Teruel who were their creditors. .that was in 1486. sixteen years later, having with the perjured testimony of the parties thus bribed convicted the Conversos of Teruel, and burned and plundered them, and having no further occasion for the debtors' services, the inquisitors, by the exercise of a treachery consistent with the character of their office, proposed to collect all the debts due to the confiscated estates!
        The fate of Teruel warned other communities of the futility of open resistance to a system backed by the kind with foreign mercenaries at his command and all right abrogated. But the New Christians, driven to the wall, were under the necessity of taking desperate measure for the protection of their property, their families, and their lives. Those at Saragossa conceived that if a few inquisitors were to be assassinated the others might become discouraged or frightened away. That secret informations were on foot, gathering testimony against them from all sources, they were well aware; the life and fortune of every man had been placed at the disposal of the vilest wretch by Inquisitor Arbues, who sat in his office, with money at his elbow, ready to pay a satisfactory price for evidence of the right sort, whether true or false. A project for getting rid of Arbues took the form of hiring some assassins to compass his elimination. Arbues knew that he had deadly enemies, or at least that he had earned them; he wore a coat of mail and a steel cap, and carried a lance with him when he went to worship. The assassins, being duly engaged by the Conversos, came upon Arbues in the cathedral, kneeling in prayer between the high altar and the choir, with his lance leaning against a pillar. One of them, stealing up behind him, creased his neck with a dagger thrust between the joints of his armor. Another pierced his arm as he arose, while a third ran him through the body. Twenty-four hours later Arbues was dead.