Note 5 — Chapter II

"No object can be presented to the imagination more gloomy," says Puigblanch, "than the period of the regeneration of this establishment in Seville. It seems as if at sight of it nature herself had shuddered, or that she wished to consummate the infelicity of Spain, so unseasonable and great was the hurricanes of the year 1481, when the Inquisition began to display its fury." "This year of 1481," says Andrew Bernaldez, an eye witness, "was a year of great rains and inundations commencing at Christmas, and continuing onwards in such manner, that the Guadalquiver bore away and destroyed the village of Copero, in which were eighty families, as well as many other places upon the banks, and the flood rose up through the battlements of Seville and the outlet of Coria, higher than it was ever known, where it remained stationary for three days, and the whole city was under the greatest apprehensions of being destroyed by water." According to this very author, a distemper also broke out in the same year, which desolated this southern part of the kingdom, till 1488. "This year," says he, "was quite out of the common order of nature in Andalusia, being, on the contrary, marked with a great and general pestilence, which occasioned an extreme mortality in all the cities, towns, and villages. In Seville, more than fifteen thousand persons died, and in Cordova the same number; and Xerez and Ecija lost each from eight to nine thousand, and the other towns and villages in the same proportion." He afterwards adds, "that a similar distemper returned with more or less activity, till at last it raged with great fury, causing the same destruction and ravages as in the first. Thus ominous were the auspices under which the re-organized Inquisition hoisted its bloody standard."