ed by witnesses, torture was
relied upon for conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one
could hear the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was
forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible duplicity it
was affirmed that the torment had not been completed at first, but had
only been suspended out of charity until the following day! The families
of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the
historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his
collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burnt at the stake ten
thousand two hundred and twenty persons, six thousand eight hundred and
sixty in effigy, and otherwise punished ninety-seven thousand three
hundred and twenty-one. This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles
wherever he could find them, And burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental
literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated
Judaism. With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the
papal government realized much money by selling to the rich
dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition.

But all these frightful atrocities proved failures. The conversions
were few. Torquemada, therefore, insisted on the immediate banishment
of every unbaptized Jew. On March 30, 1492, the edict of expulsion was
signed. All unbaptized Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, were
ordered to leave the realm by the end of the following July. If they
revisited it, they should suffer death. They might sell their effects
and take the proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in
gold or silver. Exiled thus suddenly from the land of their birth, the
land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in
the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody would
purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The Spanish clergy
occupied themselves by preaching in the public squares sermons filled
with denunciations against their victims, who, when the time for
expatriation came, swarmed in the roads and filled the air with their
cries of despair. Even the Spanish onlookers wept at the scene of agony.
Torquemada, however, enforced the ordinance that no one should afford
them any help.

Of the banished persons some made their way into Africa, some into
Italy; the latter carried with them to Naples ship-fever, which
destroyed not fewer than twenty thousand in that city, and devastated
that peninsula; some