ations as physicians, agents of government, and even officers of
state; while the "New Christians," or Jews professedly converted to
Christianity, were intermarried with the highest families in Spain, and
all this had taken place in spite of the enmity of the clergy, popular
bigotry, and the adverse legislation of _cortes_ or parliaments. But the
wealth which procured Jews and New Christians so much worldly influence
became the occasion of great suffering. The "Old Christians," being less
industrious, and therefore less affluent, were frequently their debtors.
And although usury was checked by legislators, who dreaded its pressure
on themselves, and debts were often repudiated, the Jews maintained their
position of creditors; and, as the _Cartilla_ says, creditors are often
unreasonable persons, or, at least, are considered to be such. Christians
of pure blood, therefore, finding themselves involved in long reckonings,
became increasingly impatient, and, under a cloak of zeal for the
Catholic religion, were incessantly embroiling them with the magistracy
or stirring up the populace against them.

Llorente estimates the number of Jews who perished under the fury of
mobs, in the year 1391, at upward of one hundred thousand. To evade
persecution, multitudes submitted to be baptized. More than a million had
changed name at the end of the fourteenth century. After those tumults
controversial preachers, such as San Vicente Ferrer, declaimed for popery
against Judaism; and in the first ten years of the fifteenth century a
second multitude of forced converts threw themselves into the bosom of
the Romish Church, to the discouragement of their brethern and to their
own confusion at last. They were set under the keenest vigilance of the
inquisitors, without being able even to counterfeit any attachment to the
Church, whose most grievous yoke they had put on, but which in heart they
hated.

Now the Church gloried over the declension of Judaism. In presence of
Benedict XIII, antipope, a Spaniard, wandering in Spain, because in
Rome they would not own him, a formal disputation was carried on for
sixty-nine days between Jerome of Santa Fe and other converts--or, as
the Jews not improperly called them, apostates--on the one side, and a
company of rabbis on the other. Such a controversy, carried on even
in the presence of a half-pope, could only come to the prescribed
conclusion; and after seeing all persuasion and corruption exhausted