Note 374 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

As late as the latter half of the fifteenth century, within a generation of the setting-up of the murderous New Inquisition, Spain seems to have been on the whole as much given to freethinking as France, and much more so than England. On the one hand, Averroïsm tinged somewhat the intellectual life through the Moorish environment, so that in 1464 we find revolted nobles complaining that King Enrique IV is suspected of being unsound in the faith because he has about him both enemies of Catholicism and nominal Christians who avow their disbelief in a future state.374 On the other hand, it had been noted that many were beginning to deny the need or efficacy of priestly confession; and about 1478 a Professor at Salamanca, Pedro de Osma, actually printed an argument to that effect, further challenging the power of the Pope. So slight was then the machinery of inquisition that he had to be publicly tried by a council, which merely ordered him to recant in public; and he died peacefully in 1480.375