safe conduct granted him; Jerome, of Prague, the friend and companion of Huss, burned A.D. 1416.  Myriads of their unhappy followers shared their fate in every European land.  But to Spain belongs the terrible pre-eminence of cruelty in this last century before the Reformation.  In the year 1478 a bull of Pope Sixtus IV. established the Inquisition in Spain.  “In the first year of the operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or imprisoned for life.  Whoever of the persecuted race could flee, escaped for his life.  Torquemada, now appointed Inquisitor-General for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office by his ferocity.  Anonymous accusations were received, the accused was not confronted 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....  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” (Draper’s “Conflict of Science and Religion,” p. 146).  Torquemada was, indeed, a worthy successor of Moses.  During his eighteen years of power, his list of victims is as follows:—­

Burnt at the stake alive................... 10,220
Burnt in effigy, the persons having died
in prison or fled the country............  6,860
Punished with infamy, confiscation, perpetual
imprisonment, or loss of civil
rights .................................. 97,321
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Total .....................................114,401

—­("History of the Inquisition,” by Dr. W.H.  Rule, vol. i., p. 150.  Full details of numbers are given in the “Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne,” Llorente, t.  I., pp. 272-281).

Cardinal Ximenes was not quite so successful as Torquemada, but still his roll is long: 

Burnt at the stake alive ................... 3,564
Burnt in effigy ............................ 1,232
Punished heavily .......................... 48,059
------
--(Ibid, p. 186).  Total ................... 52,855

In A.D. 1481, in the bishoprics of Seville and Cadiz, “two thousand Judaizers were burnt in person, and very many in effigy, of whom the number is not known, besides seventeen thousand subject to cruel penance” (Ibid, p. 133).  In A.D. 1485, no less than 950 persons were burned at Villa Real, now Ciudad Real.