read his doom before he reached the platform of the auto.  There he heard whether he was sentenced to relaxation—­in other words, to burning at the hands of the hangman—­or to reconciliation by means of penitence.  At the last moment, he might by confession in extremis obtain the commutation of a death sentence into life-imprisonment, or receive the favor of being strangled before he was burned.  A relapsed heretic, however—­that is, one who after being reconciled had once again apostatized, was never exempted from the penalty of burning.  To make these holocausts of human beings more ghastly, the pageant was enhanced by processions of exhumed corpses and heretics in effigy.  Artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire, side by side with living men, women, and children.  All of them alike—­fantoccini, skeletons, and quick folk—­were enveloped in the same grotesquely ghastly San Benito, with the same hideous yellow miters on their pasteboard, worm-eaten, or palpitating foreheads.  The procession presented an ingeniously picturesque discord of ugly shapes, an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues, as it defiled, to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight.

[Footnote 84:  The Supreme Council forbade the repetition of torture; but this hypocritical law was evaded in practice by declaring that the torture had been suspended.  Llorente, vol. i. p. 307.]

Spaniards—­such is the barbarism of the Latinized Iberian nature—­delighted in these shows, as they did and do in bull-fights.  Butcheries of heretics formed the choicest spectacles at royal christenings and bridals.

At Seville the Quemadero was adorned with four colossal statues of prophets, to which some of the condemned were bound, so that they might burn to death in the flames arising from the human sacrifice between them.

In the autumn of 1484 the Inquisition was introduced into Aragon; and Saragossa became its headquarters in that State.  Though the Aragonese were accustomed to the institution in its earlier and milder form, they regarded the new Holy Office with just horror.  The Marranos counted at that epoch the Home Secretary, the Grand Treasurer, a Proto-notary, and a Vice-Chancellor of the realm among their members; and they were allied by marriage with the purest aristocracy.  It is not, therefore, marvelous that a conspiracy was formed to assassinate the Chief Inquisitor, Peter Arbues.  In spite of a coat-of-mail and an iron skullcap worn beneath his monk’s dress, Arbues was murdered one evening while at prayer in church.  But the revolt, notwithstanding this murder, flashed, like an ill-loaded pistol, in the pan.  Jealousies between the old and new Christians prevented any common action; and the Inquisition took a bloody vengeance upon all concerned.  It even laid its hand on Don James of Navarre, the Infant of Tudela.