The assassins of Arbues were Juan de Esperandeu, Vicau Durango, his servant; Juan de la Badia, and Mateo Ram and his squire Tristanico Leonis, with three masked men who remained unknown. Vidau Druango was the first to be caught and turned over to the inquisitors, who took the usual means to wring from him the details of the plot. Having learned all he knew his captors cut off his hands and nailed them to a door, and when dead his body was dragged to the market-place, beheaded and quartered, and the fragments suspended in the streets. The fate of Esperandeu was similar, except that he was dragged to the market-place alive, and there quartered and beheaded. La Badia, being sentenced to burning, broke a glass lamp and swallowed the fragments, which killed him. The next day his corpse was dragged and quartered and his hands were cut off. Mateo Ram suffered the loss of his hands, and was then burned.
        Supernatural events followed the death of Arbues. On the night of his murder, if we may believe the liars who recorded the wonders of those days, the holy bell of Villela tolled without human hands, breaking the bull’s pizzle with which the clapper was secured - surely an exercise of divine power. His blood, spilled in the cathedral, dried two weeks and then liquefied; when the conspirators concerned in his removal were examined by the inquisitors their mouths turned black and their tongues parched so that they could not speak until they had drank, and it was popularly believed that when, in trying to flee the kingdom, they reached the borders, they were paralyzed by the Almighty oar the saints, and fell an easy prey to their pursuers. All these wonders were utilized for what they were worth, but the most profitable miracle vouchsafed was that the trials of the conspirators “led to the discovery of innumerable heretics, who were duly penanced or burned.”
        On a populace capable of believing these inventions, the effect of the assassination was to cause a revulsion of feeling in favor of the Holy Inquisition. Catholics who had been hostile to the institution now became its advocates, and the city rang with the cry, “Burn the Conversos who have slain the inquisitor!” Blood called for blood. There was danger that the Inquisition would be cheated of its prey by a massacre of the New Christians. The frightened elders of Saragossa hastened to call a meeting, at which the prosecution of all concerned was authorized regardless of all the rights and customs of the kingdom. As a feature of the action taken to avenge the crime a proclamation was issued excommunicating all having knowledge of the conspiracy who would not within a given time come forward and reveal what they knew. The murder took place in 1485. Three years later, the wife of Gaspar de la Caballeria, probably having quarreled with her husband’s brother Juan, bore to the Inquisition the tale that Juan had offered Gaspar five hundred florins to kill Arbues. Juan died in jail in 1490, and his body was burned, while Gaspar suffered int eh auto-da-fe of 1492. Expressing approval of the murder of the inquisitor was among the crimes for which Pedro Sanchez was burned in 1489, and constituted the offense for which a woman named Brianda de Bardaxi suffered imprisonment and the loss of one-third of her property, although it could not be proved against her.
        One result attributed to this murder was that Ferdinand and Isabella procured from Pope Innocent VIII an order on all princes, rulers, and magistrates throughout Christendom to seize and deliver to the Inquisition of Spain all persons who should be designated to them. The powers upon whom the requisition was made were not to ask for proof; they had to make the surrender and provide safe-conduct to the frontier under pain of the penalties provided for sheltering heretics. “Fortunately for humanity,” says Lea, “this atrocious attempt to establish a new international law by papal absolution was practically ignored.”
        Ferdinand, on his own authority, and without awaiting the action of the pope, canonized the deceased Arbues; he established his veneration as a martyr, caused him to be worshiped like the holist saint, and built him a splendid tomb. The holy see lagged in the recognition of Arbues, and it was not until 1867 that he was canonized as a martyr by Pius IX.
        It had cost the conspirators six hundred florins (about $640), one hundred of which went to the assassin, to effect the decease of Arbues. Its consequences were to cost scores of them their lives and fortunes, and probably as many of the innocent as of the guilty fell under condemnation. Llorente states that the victims of the crusade against the New Christians which followed the murder of the inquisitor numbered more than two hundred and Amidor de los Rios agrees with him; but Lea thinks this an exaggeration. He says: “I find nine executed in person, besides two suicides, thirteen burned in effigy and four penanced for complicity. Besides these are two penanced for suborning false witness in favor of Luis de Santangel (an alleged conspirator, who was beheaded in the market-place, his head set on a pole, and his body burned), seventeen for aiding or sheltering the guilty, and two for rejoicing at the crime. Altogether fifty or sixty will probably cover the total of those who suffered in various ways.”

        The worst effect of the revulsion of feeling in favor of the Inquisition caused by Arbues murder was that it gave the institution new life and enlarged the work of the Saragossa tribunal. Instead of making the position of inquisitor more dangerous, the crime made the life of the incumbent more secure and aggravated his insolence. The tribunal now moved its quarters to the structure, half palace, half fortress, outside the walls, know as the Aljaferia, and Ferdinand proclaimed that he and his successors took it under their special protection. Hitherto the receiver had been able to attend to all the confiscations himself; now he was empowered to appoint deputies throughout the land to attend to the increased work consequent upon the extensive confiscations which the new conditions had stimulated.
        Llorente and Amidor may have exaggerated the number executed for complicity in the Arbues affair, but they do not overstate the total of victims of the Saragossa tribunal of the period covered by the prosecution of the conspirators. Between 1485 and 1492, according to the records, the Saragossa Inquisition alone got away with 417 victims.
        From the records unearthed by Lea, it is learned that the man who financed the voyage of Columbus which resulted in the discovery of America was a heretic. He was Luis de Santangel, cousin of the “conspirator” of the same name who had his head set on a pole, and he advanced 16,000 or 17,000 ducats (a ducat being worth $1.40) to fit out the Genoese navigator’s ships. He had his turn with the Inquisition in 1491, and again later on, when his property was confiscated. After his death, about 1500, Ferdinand was moved to return the plunder to his children.
        The Santangels were noted heretics. Coming into notice at the time of the Arbues murder, they were conspicuous in the list of condemned during the following decade. Another numerous house in Aragon was that of the descendants of Alazar Usuf and his brother. These took the name of Sanchez. They were rich and held high offices of state. In 1486 the Inquisition began the work of extinguishing the family. Eleven were burned in person or in effigy before 1553, and during the same period eight of the Sanchez connection were penanced, which means confiscation of property and the laying of disabilities on descendants.
        “It is unnecessary,” observed the author of “The Inquisition of Spain”, “to multiply examples of what was going on in Spain during those dreadful years, for Aragon was exceptional only so far as the industrious notary, Juan de Anchias, kept and compiled the records that should attest the indelible stain on descendants. There is something awful in the hideous coolness with which he summarizes the lists of victims too numerous to particularize: “The Gomez of Huesca are New Christians, and many of them have been abandoned to the secular arm (to be burned), and many others have been reconciled”; ‘The Zaportas and Benetes of Monzon....many of them have been condemned and abandoned to the secular arm...’”
        It is an insoluble problem why the powers should have tolerated the existence of the Holy Inquisition while they frowned on pirates, road agents, and brigands.
        Catalonia, one of the kingdoms of Aragon, furnished an example of the liberty-destroying power of the church-and-state protected league of assassins and freebooters called the Holy Inquisition. This little kingdom had advanced to a conception of rights and liberties, which it jealously guarded. The guarantees of these were systematically arranged and plainly written out in two volumes and two languages, Latin and Limosin, and kept open to the public, so that no citizen need by ignorant of his rights. Neither official nor king might violate them without opposition by every lawful means.
        The Catalans never assented to the jurisdiction of Inquisitor-General Torquemada. They had an inquisitor of their own in the person of Juan Comte, who appears to have made his position a sinecure, for he gave the people no trouble, and as he held a papal commission he was not to be summarily superseded. Ferdinand placed a receiver of confiscations at Barcelona, and prepared to introduce the methods elsewhere prevailing. The citizens took measures to prevent their inquisitor from displaying increased activity, and sent Ferdinand a message asserting their rights. The royal hypocrite and liar assured them they need not be alarmed about their rights and liberties, for the Inquisition would do nothing to violate them, would use no cruelty, and would treat all with justice and clemency. He added that further remonstrance on their part would be useless. Then he communicated with the pope, setting forth that the Catalan inquisitors commissioned by his holiness were not attending to business, and requesting that power be granted to himself and Isabella and Torquemada to appoint and remove inquisitors there at pleasure. Hearing nothing from the pontiff, the king had Torquemada send two appointees to Barcelona, ordering the Catalan officials, under pain of five thousand gold florins, to receive and convey them safely, to aid them in their work, to arrest and imprison in chains whomsoever the new inquisitors might accuse, and to inflict due punishment on all whom these individuals relaxed to the secular arm. Ferdinand’s order was disregarded by the officials of Catalonia.
        After two years of pressure Pope Innocent, whose opposition to Ferdinand’s desires had been purchased and paid for by the Barcelona Conversos in 1484, yielded to the king, and removed the inquisitors holding papal commissions, thus giving Ferdinand and Torquemada a free hand, and the Barcelona Inquisition was soon in working order, manned by the breed of criminals who operated those of Cordova and Saragossa. In July, 1487, the municipal officials took the oath of obedience to Inquisitor Alonso de Espina, in preference, doubtless, to being removed, racked, and penanced. Five months later the first procession of penitents took place, consisting of twenty-one mean and twenty-nine women, and the next week there was another in which the participants were scourged in addition to being invested with the sanbenito. In January of the following year the first auto-da-fe was celebrated with four living victims and the effigies of twelve fugitives. In 1488 there were seven burnings and in 1489 three. Owing to the prejudice of local secular officials against the barbarities practiced in common by inquisitors and savages, and most favored by the church, the sufferers in these early autos were strangled before being burned. Ferdinand had to complain of the official slackness which permitted this clemency, and also that in the jurisdiction of the Barcelona Inquisition the work was not yielding what is should in the way of confiscations.