Then Isabella yielded; and in 1481 the Holy Office was founded at Seville.  It began its work by publishing a comprehensive edict against all New Christians suspected of Judaizing, which offense was so constructed as to cover the most innocent observance of national customs.  Resting from labor on Saturday; performing ablutions at stated times; refusing to eat pork or puddings made of blood; and abstaining from wine, sufficed to color accusations of heresy.  Men who had joined the Catholic communion after the habits of a lifetime had been formed, thus found themselves exposed to peril of death by the retention of mere sanitary rules.[83]

[Footnote 83:  See Lavallee, Histoire des Inquisitions, vol. ii. pp. 341-361, for the translation of a process instituted in 1570 against a Mauresque female slave.  Suspected of being a disguised infidel, she was exposed to the temptations of a Moorish spy, and convicted mainly on the evidence furnished by certain Mussulman habits to which she adhered.  Llorente reports a similar specimen case, vol. i. p. 442.  The culprit was a tinker aged 71, accused in 1528 of abstaining from pork and wine, and using certain ablutions.  He defended himself by pleading that, having been converted at the age of 45, it did not suit his taste to eat pork or drink wine, and that his trade obliged him to maintain cleanliness by frequent washing.  He was finally condemned to carry a candle at an auto da fe in sign of penitence, and to pay four ducats, the costs of his trial.  His detention lasted from September, 1529, till December 18, 1530.]

Upon the publication of this edict, there was an exodus of Jews by thousands into the fiefs of independent vassals of the crown—­the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of Arcos.  All emigrants were ipso facto declared heretics by the Holy Office.  During the first year after its foundation, Seville beheld 298 persons burned alive, and 79 condemned to perpetual imprisonment.  A large square stage of stone, called the Quemadero, was erected for the execution of those multitudes who were destined to suffer death by hanging or by flame.  In the same year, 2000 were burned and 17,000 condemned to public penitence, while even a larger number were burned in effigy, in other parts of the kingdom.

While estimating the importance of these punishments we must remember that they implied confiscation of property.  Thus whole families were orphaned and consigned to penury.  Penitence in public carried with it social infamy, loss of civil rights and honors, intolerable conditions of ecclesiastical surveillance, and heavy pecuniary fines.  Penitents who had been reconciled, returned to society in a far more degraded condition than convicts released on ticket of leave.  The stigma attached in perpetuity to the posterity of the condemned, whose names were conspicuously emblazoned upon church-walls as foemen to Christ and to the State.