Note 381 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

It was thus the fate of Spain to illustrate once for all the power of a dogmatic religious system to extirpate the spirit of reason from an entire nation for a whole era. There and there only, save for a time in Italy, did the Inquisition become all-powerful; and it wrought for the evisceration of the intellectual and material life of Spain with a demented zeal to which there is no parallel in later history. In the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, after several random massacres and much persecution of the “New Christians” or doubtful converts from Judaism,381 the unconverted Jews of Spain were in 1489 penned into Ghettos, and were in 1492 expelled bodily from the country, with every circumstance of cruelty, so far as Church and State could compass their plans. By this measure at least 160,000 subjects382 of more than average value were lost to the State. Portugal and other Christian countries took the same cruel step a few years later; but Spain carried the policy much further. From the year of its establishment, the Inquisition was hotly at work destroying heresy of every kind; and the renowned Torquemada, the confessor of Isabella, is credited with having burned over ten thousand persons in his eighteen years of office as Grand Inquisitor, besides torturing many thousands. Close upon a hundred thousand more were terrified into submission; and a further six thousand burned in effigy in their absence or after death.383 The destruction of books was proportionally thorough;384 and when Lutheran Protestantism arose it was persistently killed out; thousands leaving the country in view of the hopelessness of the cause.385 At this rate, every vestige of independent thought must soon have disappeared from any nation in the world. If she is to be judged by the number of her slain and exiled heretics, Spain must once have been nearly as fecund in reformative and innovating thought as any State in northern Europe; but the fatal conjunction of the royal and the clerical authority sufficed for a whole era to denude her of every variety of the freethinking species.386