Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain by Matthew Carr Page A

in Aragon, despite strong local opposition that bordered on sedition from some Aragonese towns. Even as the War of Granada was unfolding, Inquisition commissioners accompanied by their green-clad escorts, or “familiars” traveled the length and breadth of Spain, in an attempt to eradicate the heretical “infection” from Spanish society. Towns and cities across Spain became accustomed to the ritualistic pattern of these investigations, which began with the public reading of the Edict of Faith, calling upon the population to denounce the judaizers in their midst or confess to a detailed list of forbidden practices and telltale signs of the Jewish “superstition.” Such evidence might include a reluctance to eat pork, wearing clean clothes, not working on Saturdays, burying the dead in virgin soil, or not making the sign of the cross. Offenders who confessed willingly to such offenses could expect lenient treatment in the first instance, but repeat offenders were liable to excommunication and the terrifying anathema pronounced by an Inquisitorial edict in Valencia:
    May they be accursed in eating and drinking, in waking and sleeping, in coming and going. Accursed be they in living and dying, and may they ever be hardened in their sins, and the devil be at their right hand always; may their vocation be sinful, and their days be few and evil; may their substance be enjoyed by others, and their children be orphans and their wives widows. May their children ever be in need, and may none help them; may they be turned out of their homes and their goods taken by usurers; and may they find nobody to have compassion on them; may their children be ruined and outcast, and their names also; and their wickedness be ever present in the divine memory. 7
     
    Denunciations led to further arrests, torture and interrogations, imprisonment and secret tribunals. The convicted were paraded in the theatrical public spectacle of the auto-da-fé, or “pageant of faith,” in which “reconciled” heretics who had recanted their sins or confessed to less serious offenses were paraded in their conical hats and sambenitos , carrying burning candles. The more egregious offenders were “relaxed to the secular arm”—handed over to the local authorities to be burned at the stake. Between 1485 and 1501, some 2,000 Conversos were burned to death, including 250 in Toledo alone, in the bloodiest period in the Inquisition’s history.
    Even as the Inquisition conducted its ruthless investigation of Marrano heresy, tens of thousands of Jews continued to openly engage in the same rituals and practices that were leading others to prison and the stake. Because they had not converted, they remained outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, which nevertheless blamed them for having lured their former co-religionists away from their adopted faith.
    The more the Inquisition uncovered evidence of judaizing among the Conversos, the more its officials argued that the presence of unconverted Jews was exacerbating the problem. Some talked of exterminating the Jewish population altogether. Others urged Ferdinand and Isabella to remove them from Spanish soil. The Catholic Monarchs were initially reluctant to take such a drastic step. In 1490 however, as the war in Granada was moving toward its conclusion, a sensational crime was uncovered in the town of La Guardia in Castile, where a group of Jews and Conversos were accused of the hideous ritual murder of a Christian child.
    No body was ever found, nor was it even clear that any family in La Guardia even lost a child, but in the course of a sixteen-month Inquisitorial interrogation, two Jews and five Conversos confessed to having crucified the child and cut out his heart as part of a black magic ritual supposedly aimed at the Inquisition itself. On November 16, 1491, the Jewish members of the group were publicly torn apart with hot pincers and the Conversos burned at the stake for what was almost certainly a