The Spanish Inquisition was now firmly grounded.  Directed by Torquemada, it began to encroach upon the crown, to insult the episcopacy, to defy the Papacy, to grind the Commons, and to outrage by its insolence the aristocracy.  Ferdinand’s avarice had overreached itself by creating an ecclesiastical power dangerous to the best interests of the realm, but which fascinated a fanatically-pious people, and the yoke of which could not be thrown off.  The Holy Office grew every year in pride, pretensions, and exactions.  It arrogated to its tribunal crimes of usury, bigamy, blasphemous swearing, and unnatural vice, which appertained by right to the secular courts.  It depopulated Spain by the extermination and banishment of at least three million industrious subjects during the first 139 years of its existence.  It attacked princes of the blood,[85] archbishops, fathers of the Tridentine Council.  It filled every city in the kingdom, the convents of the religious, and the palaces of the nobility, with spies.  The Familiars, or lay brethren devoted to its service, lived at charges of the communes, and debauched society by crimes of rapine, lust, and violence.[86] Ignorant and bloodthirsty monks composed its provincial tribunals, who, like the horrible Lucero el Tenebroso at Cordova, paralyzed whole provinces with a veritable reign of terror.[87] Hated and worshiped, its officers swept through the realm in the guise of powerful condottieri.  The Grand Inquisitor maintained a bodyguard of fifty mounted Familiars and two hundred infantry; his subordinates were allowed ten horsemen and fifty archers apiece.  Where these black guards appeared, city gates were opened; magistrates swore fealty to masters of more puissance than the king; the resources of flourishing districts were placed at their disposal.  Their arbitrary acts remained unquestioned, their mysterious sentences irreversible.  Shrouded in secrecy, amenable to no jurisdiction but their own, they reveled in the license of irresponsible dominion.  Spain gradually fell beneath the charm of their dark fascination.  A brave though cruel nation drank delirium from the poison-cup of these vile medicine-men, whose Moloch-worship would have disgusted cannibals.

[Footnote 85:  Llorente, in his introduction to the History of the Inquisition, gives a long list of illustrious Spanish victims.]

[Footnote 86:  See Llorente, vol. i. p. 349, for their outrages on women.]

[Footnote 87:  For the history of Lucero’s tyranny, read Llorente, vol. i. pp. 345-353.  When at last he had to be deposed, it was not to a dungeon or the scaffold, but to his bishopric of Almeria that this miscreant was relegated.]