The festival held for the exaltation of the holy Catholic faith and in honor of Judas Maccabeus “lasted to a late hour of the night,” and all who assisted got their indulgences and privileges granted by the Supreme Pontiff.
        Brief accounts of the autos held in Madrid and attended by the king and queen contain the substance of the foregoing description of the one celebrated in Lima. There was no variation except that the king himself, instead of his viceroy, made acknowledgment of the supereminence of the Inquisition and took the oath to support it; and that the burnings, which were of course more numerous, were preceded by mass as well as a sermon. The victims, men and youths, matrons and maidens, passed in review before their majesties, who sat within the sound of their cries of distress when the flames touched them, while the odor of their burning flesh reached the nostrils of the royal personages. The pious and heartless monarchs could with mental vision behold the holy Catholic faith exalted and the cause of Christ advanced. They could not see their country’s abasement, nor their own names going down to future ignominy and to the detestation of all posterity not denatured by that same exalted faith.
        In the earlier autos the living victims outnumbered the dead and absent. As burnings increased the conditions were reversed, and absentees became the most numerous. They had been struck with terror by the thought that they might be delated to the Inquisition and had fled the country. So large was the emigration of potential heretics that, as when the Jews were expelled, a dearth of material on which the church might exercise its benignant influence was feared, and to meet the situation, edicts were issued forbidding all persons of Jewish lineage to leave Spain, and imposing a heavy fine on ship-masters conveying them away. To supplement the royal edicts, the Archbishop of Messina, 1499, issued an order, which was published throughout the realm and confirmed by Inquisitor-General Deza two years later, to the effect that no ship-captain or merchant should transport across seas any New Christian, whether Jewish or Moorish, without a royal licence, under pain of confiscation, of excommunication, and of being held as a protector of heretics. So great had grown the power of the Inquisition at this period that it could thus command and be obeyed in matters far more temporal than “spiritual”. The question may arise why, if the purpose of the Inquisition was to drive heresy and apostasy from a Christian land, these fugitives were not permitted, and even encouraged, to go elsewhere. There are two reasons - one of which is that the inquisitors wanted their blood; and, secondly, the Inquisition did not propose to be cheated out of the portable property which the fugitives took with them. Agents were therefore posted at all ports to arrest and rob - for robbery is what confiscation means - all New Christians desiring to cross the sea. Those who escaped were recaptured when possible. We read in Lea’s “History of the Inquisition in Spain” that in 1496 on e Micer Martin, an inquisitor of Mallorca, heard of some New Christians who were in Bugia, a seaport town in Africa. He forthwith despatched the notary, Lope de Vergara, thither to seize them; but the unbelieving Moors, finding out the object of the expedition, put the notary and his party in jail and kept them there for three years. De Vergara was ransomed, and in view of his miseries Ferdinand, kind of Spain, ordered the receiver at Mallorca to pay him two hundred and fifty gold ducats, which he received and enjoyed instead of being hanged for a pirate and kidnapper, the fate of many better men.
        Everybody but the king soon learned that it was unsafe to rebuke an agent of the Inquisition or to complain of its impudent and oppressive acts. So its officers had practically their own way and were not called to account, except occasionally by Ferdinand, who kept an eye on the Holy Office to see that he was not robbed of his share of the confiscations. Some of the nobles objected to the inquisitors’ plundering their dependents or tenants; these Ferdinand reconciled by granting them a share of the booty. Local officials for a time protested against officers of the Inquisition entering their towns and taking away citizens without showing any authority for the act, but the king sustained the Holy Office in overriding recognized law by ordering the surrender of heretics on demand of the inquisitors under a penalty of fine and confiscation. Disobedience was rendered dangerous by threats of prosecution for abetting heresy, and the reign of God’s butchers became almost absolute.
        In the year 1500, at Herrera, a girl “uttered scandals against the faith”, and was taken into custody by the local authorities, who nevertheless declined to hand her over to the boasted mercies of the Inquisition. The king himself ordered her surrender, and with a number of her unfortunate sympathizers she ultimately came to the stake and was burned in the name of Jesus.
        Ferdinand sometimes rebuked inquisitors for excess of zeal, as when by wholesale arrests a town bade fair to be depopulated, but it is not recorded that any attention was ever paid to his dispraise. The Inquisition might apologize or explain, but it never reformed. On the other hand, he was prompt and effective in suppressing opposition to the proceedings of its agents. In Valencia on one occasion a confiscation excited great popular feeling, and the governor and his counselors met to protest against it, saying in the course of their deliberations something which proved displeasing to the inquisitors, who reported to Ferdinand. The king wrote to the officials of Valencia calling them down in set terms, and telling them that it was none of their business if the inquisitors committed an injustice. It was their duty to aid the Inquisition, and he ordered them in future to do so. Ferdinand was so constituted that he took as much pleasure in attending an auto-da-fe and witnessing the suffering inflicted on a fellow creature for Christ’s sake as the king of Spain does to-day in going to a bull-fight or shooting pigeons. It was one of his diversions, and on two occasions, one in 1512 and the other the year following, he made a present of two hundred ducats ($280) to the inquisitor who had “pulled off” an unusually successful auto. He even gave fifteen ducats to the messenger who brought him the news.
        It has been said that the Inquisition was under the direction of honest bigots who performed their duty conscientiously. Crimes so atrocious as those of this institution, it is thought, could never has been perpetrated except by sincere fanatics who placed duty to God, as they conceived it, before everything else. Something altogether different is the truth. It is not at all probably that any intelligent man ever put another to death by reason of a difference in religious belief without knowing that in doing so he was committing a foul murder. And when to murder is added torture, all men who have risen above savagery know that the deed is infamous. There is no more excuse for these criminals, from the pope to the king and the inquisitor-general, and so down to the last slimy and crawling familiar, than for any other homicides. The palliation is less than in many cases punished by hanging, because provocation was wanting and the murders were deliberate and wanton.
        The promoters of the Inquisition being criminals, it was to be expected that their propensities would manifest themselves in more than one form. And so it turned out, for they were thieves and “grafters” as well as assassins. In 1499 the chief inquisitor at Cordova was one Doctor Guiral. It having been noticed that the revenue from the Cordova tribunal was smaller than it should be, Dr. Guiral underwent investigation by order of the pope. The investigators found that the holy man had pocketed 150,000 maravedis by selling to penitents exemptions from wearing the sanbenito, or penitential garment; that in collusion with the receiver of confiscations he had plundered that fund to a large extent; that his pilferings from sequestrated property had yielded among other things ninety-three pearls of great value; that he made money by claiming percentages offered for the discovery of confiscated property that had been concealed; that he imposed fines on reconciled penitents and kept the money; that he negotiated for the New Christians of Cordova an agreement under which they compounded with 2,200,000 maravedis for confiscations to which they might become liable, and that for this he received from them as commission nearly 100,000, to which he added 50,000 by enabling two of the contributor to cheat their associates by escaping payment of their assessment to the common fund. He was arrested for being too greedy. Robbing heretics was no crime, but when the royal treasury suffered from his holding out the king took notice of the case. As there is no record of Dr. Guiral’s conviction, it is presumed that he squared himself with the persons higher up; at any rate, he was transferred to Avila, where he continued his practices, though on a smaller scale. His operations here consisted of extorting money from the relatives of his prisoners, and he did not hesitate to compound offenses for what the offender might be able to give.
        Guiral was replaced at the Cordova tribunal by a man who could make the position pay. The criminal to succeed him was Don Rodriguiz Lucero, who had already successfully administered the Inquisition at Xeres. Within a year the activity of Lucero, with his genius for unearthing new heretics, had made Cordova one of the best paying stations of the system. Ferdinand gave him two assistants at a salary of 10,000 maravedis, and he so expanded the business that in 1503 he could cash a royal order for 500,000 to pay inquisitorial salaries elsewhere. Lucero worked extensively among office-holders, arresting them in groups, and leaving their offices vacant. As in Spain all offices were for sale, the crown had no better asset than a vacancy, which was disposed of to any eligible party who had money or favors to give in exchange for a chance to fill it. Putting New Christians out of office and filling their places with born Catholics afforded some of the biggest profits of persecution.
        A church dignitary was as lawful game for Inquisitor Lucero as any other person of means. Working with him for the accomplishment of his villainies was Juan Roiz de Calcena, secretary to King Ferdinand in inquisitorial affairs, and also secretary to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition. These two vultures, Lucero and Calcena, singled out as their prey, in 1595, the archdeacon of Castro, Juan Munoz, a youth of seventeen, the son of a native Christian mother and a converted hidalgo. His place, worth 300,000 maravedis a year, would become a valuable article of commerce with Munoz out of it. Lucero and Calcena organized a plot against him, involving his parents in his ruin, and he was penanced to disable him from holding office in the church or state. The spoils of this raid were divided between a cardinal who had been an accomplice of the conspirators, and the royal treasurer Morales, Lucero, and Calcena. Morales got the archdeaconry vacated by the persecution of Munoz; Lucero was rewarded with a billet as canon in Seville, with some benefices elsewhere, while Secretary Calcena gathered in property estimated at 4,000,000 maravedis. A maravidi, the monetary unit of Castile, was only three-eighths of a cent, but four million of them amounted to a considerable sum.
        That the inquisitors were out for plunder, and made the defense of the faith a pretext, is proved by the fact that native Christians of unblemished reputation and undoubted orthodoxy were denounced and robbed. These operations were carried on with the knowledge of the royalty, for of course the Old Christians would not submit to pillage and imprisonment without protest to the throne. It was like being turned on by a friend. Both the secular memorials stating that fidelity to the faith afforded them no protection for their lives and property, and that the inquisitor Lucero had certain of his prisoners assiduously instructed in Jewish prayers and rites, so that they could be accurate in the testimony which, by threats of torture, he forced them to bear against native orthodox Christians. By the aid of these trained and tortured witnesses Lucero fabricated a conspiracy of the New Christians to convert Spain to Judaism, and some of the alleged conspirators he convicted of traversing the land with this purpose in view, although they had never in their lived been outside the city gates. He gathered lists of persons who had attended the sermons of an actual or fabulous Judaizer named Membreque, and burnt one hundred and seven of them alive in a single auto-da-fe. He had more than four hundred prisoners at once, and as they crowded his dungeons he sent numbers of them to Toro, where they would be dealt with by Inquisitor-General Deza, who resided there with the Suprema. The Suprema was a committee having jurisdiction over all matters connected with the faith, its full name being the Concejo de la Supreme y General Inquisicion.
        The Bishop of Cordova and all the authorities of the city, in a petition to the pope, declared that the motive for the violence and rapine of the Inquisitors was greed for the confiscations, “which they habitually embezzled.”