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 be 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 reached Turkey, a few England.  Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and old people, died by the way; many of them in the agonies of thirst.

This action against the Jews was soon followed by one against the Moors.  A pragmatica was issued at Seville, February, 1502, setting forth the obligations of the Castilians to drive the enemies of God from the land, and ordering that all unbaptized Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon above the age of infancy should leave the country by the end of April.  They might sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they were forbidden to emigrate to the Mohammedan dominions; the penalty of disobedience was death.  Their condition was thus worse than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they chose.  Such was the fiendish intolerance of the Spaniards, that they asserted the government would be justified in taking the lives of all the Moors for their shameless infidelity.