Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  But Pope Alexander was dead; Cesare’s might in in Italy was dissipated; his credit gone. There lay no profit for Louis in keeping faith with him; there lay some profit in breaking it. Alas, that a king should stain his honour with base and vulgar lies to minister to his cupidity, and that he should set them down above his seal and signature to shame him through centuries still in the womb of Time!

  Cesare Borgia, landless, without right to any title, he that had held so many, betrayed and abandoned on every side, had now nothing to offer in the world’s market but his stout sword and his glad courage. These went to the first bidder for them, who happened to be his brother-in-law King Jean.

  Navarre at the time was being snarled and quarrelled over by France and Spain, both menacing its independence, each pretending to claims upon it which do not, in themselves, concern us.

  In addition, the country itself was torn by two factions — the Beaumontes and the Agramontes — and it was entrusted to Cesare to restore Navarre to peace and unity at home before proceeding — with the aid upon which he depended from the Emperor Maximilian — to deal with the enemies beyond her frontiers.

  The Castle of Viana was being held by Louis de Beaumont — chief of the faction that bore his name — and refused to surrender to the king. To reduce it and compel Beaumont to obedience went Cesare as Captain-General of Navarre, early in February of 1507. He commanded a considerable force, some 10,000 strong, and with this and his cannon he laid siege to the citadel.

  The natural strength of the place was such as might have defied any attempt to reduce it by force; but victuals were running low, and there was every likelihood of its being speedily starved into surrender. To frustrate this, Beaumont conceived the daring plan of attempting to send in supplies from Mendavia. The attempt being made secretly, by night and under a strong escort, was entirely successful; but, in retreating, the Beaumontese were surprised in the dawn of that February morning by a troop of reinforcements coming to Cesare’s camp. These, at sight of the rebels, immediately gave the alarm.

  The most hopeless confusion ensued in the town, where it was at once imagined that a surprise attack was being made upon the Royalists, and that they had to do with the entire rebel army.

  Cesare, being aroused by the din and the blare of trumpets calling men to arms, sprang for his weapons, armed himself in haste, flung himself on a horse, and, without pausing so much as to issue a command to his waiting men-at-arms, rode headlong down the street to the Puerta del Sol. Under the archway of the gate his horse stumbled and came down with him. With an oath, Cesare wrenched the animal to its feet again, gave it the spur, and was away at a mad, furious gallop in pursuit of the retreating Beaumont rearguard.

  The citizens, crowding to the walls of Viana, watched that last reckless ride of his with amazed, uncomprehending eyes. The peeping sun caught his glittering armour as he sped, so that of a sudden he must have seemed to them a thing of fire — meteoric, as had been his whole life’s trajectory which was now swiftly dipping to its nadir.

  Whether he was frenzied with the lust of battle, riding in the reckless manner that was his wont, confident that his men followed, yet too self-centred to ascertain, or whether — as seems more likely — it was simply that his horse had bolted with him, will never be known until all things are known.

  Suddenly he was upon the rearguard of the fleeing rebels. His sword flashed up and down; again and again they may have caught the gleam of it from Viana’s walls, as he smote the foe. Irresistible as a thunderbolt, he clove himself a way through those Beaumontese. He was alone once more, a flying, dazzling figure of light, away beyond that rearguard which he left scathed and disordered by his furious passage. Still his mad career continued, and he bore down upon the main body of the escort.

  Beaumont sat his horse to watch, in such amazement as you may conceive, the wild approach of this unknown rider.

  Seeing him unsupported, some of the count’s men detached themselves to return and meet this single foe and oblige him with the death he so obviously appeared to seek.

  They hedged him about — we do not know their number — and, engaging him, they drew him from the road and down into the hollow space of a ravine.

  And so, in the thirty-second year of his age, and in all the glory of his matchless strength, his soul possessed of the lust of combat, sword in hand, warding off the attack that rains upon him, and dealing death about him, he meets his end. From the walls of Viana his resplendent armour renders him still discernible, until, like a sun to its setting, he passes below the rim of that ravine, and is lost to the watcher’s view.

  Death awaited him amid the shadows of that hollow place.

  Unhorsed by now, he fought with no concern for the odds against him, and did sore execution upon his assailants, ere a sword could find an opening in his guard to combine with a gap in his armour and so drive home. That blade had found, maybe, his lungs. Still he swung his sword, swaying now upon his loosening knees. His mouth was full of blood. It was growing dark. His hands began to fail him. He reeled like a drunkard, sapped of strength, and then the end came quickly. Blows unwarded showered upon him now.

  He crashed down in all the glory of his rich armour, which those brigand-soldiers already coveted. And thus he died — mercifully, maybe happily, for he had no time in which to taste the bitterness of death — that awful draught which he had forced upon so many.

  Within a few moments of his falling, this man who had been a living force, whose word had carried law from the Campagna to the Bolognese, was so much naked, blood-smeared carrion — for those human vultures stripped him to the skin; his very shirt must they have. And there, a stark, livid corpse, of no more account than any dog that died last Saturday, they left Cesare Borgia of France, Duke of Romagna and Valentinois, Prince of Andria, and Lord of a dozen Tyrannies.

  The body was found there anon by those who so tardily rode after their leader, and his dismayed troopers bore those poor remains to Viana. The king, arriving there that very day, horror-stricken at the news and sight that awaited him, ordered Cesare a magnificent funeral, and so he was laid to rest before the High Altar of Sainte Marie de Viane.

  To rest? May the soul of him rest at least, for men — Christian men — have refused to vouchsafe that privilege to his poor ashes.

  Nearly two hundred years later — at the close of the seventeenth century, a priest of God and a bishop, one who preached a gospel of love and mercy so infinite that he dared believe by its lights no man to have been damned, came to disturb the dust of Cesare Borgia. This Bishop of Calahorra — lineal descendant in soul of that Pharisee who exalted himself in God’s House, thrilled with titillations of delicious horror at the desecrating presence of the base publican — had his pietist’s eyes offended by the slab that marked Cesare Borgia’s resting-place.(1)

  1 It bore the following legend:

  AQUI YACE EN POCA TIERRA

  AL QUE TODO LE TEMIA

  EL QUE LA PAZ Y LA GUERRA

  EN LA SUA MANO TENIA.

  OH TU QUE VAS A BUSCAR

  COSAS DIGNAS DE LOAR

  SI TU LOAS LO MAS DIGNO

  AQUI PARE TU CAMINO

  NO CURES DE MAS ANDAR.

  which, more or less literally may be Englished as follows: “Here in a little earth, lies one whom all did fear; one whose hands dispensed both peace and war. Oh, you that go in search of things deserving praise, if you would praise the worthiest, then let your journey end here, nor trouble to go farther.”

  The pious, Christian bishop had read of this man — perhaps that life of him published by the apostate Gregorio Leti under the pen-name of Tommaso Tommasi, which had lately seen the light — and he ordered the tomb’s removal from that holy place. And thus it befell that the ashes of Cesare Borgia were scattered and lost.

  Charlotte d’Albret was bereft of her one friend, Queen Jeanne, in that same year of Cesare’s death. The Duchess of Valentinois withdrew to La MotteFeuilly, and for the seven years remaining of her
life was never seen other than in mourning; her very house was equipped with sombre, funereal furniture, and so maintained until her end, which supports the view that she had conceived affection and respect for the husband of whom she had seen so little.

  On March 14, 1514, that poor lady passed from a life which appears to have offered her few joys.

  Louise de Valentinois — a handsome damsel of the age of fourteen — remained for three years under the tutelage of the Duchess of Angoulême — the mother of King Francis I — to whom Charlotte d’Albret had entrusted her child. Louise married, at the age of seventeen, Louis de la Trémouille, Prince de Talmont and Vicomte de Thouars, known as the Knight Sans Peur et Sans Reproche. She maintained some correspondence with her aunt, Lucrezia Borgia, whom she had never seen, and ever signed herself “Louise de Valentinois.” At the age of thirty — Trémouille having been killed at Pavia — she married, in second nuptials, Philippe de Bourbon-Busset.

  Lucrezia died in 1519, one year after her mother, Vanozza de’Catanei, with whom she corresponded to the end.

  REQUIESCANT!

  TORQUEMADA AND THE SPANISH INQUISITION: A HISTORY

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER I. EARLY PERSECUTIONS

  CHAPTER II. THE INQUISITION CANONICALLY ESTABLISHED

  CHAPTER III. THE ORDER OF ST. DOMINIC

  CHAPTER IV. ISABELLA THE CATHOLIC

  CHAPTER V. THE JEWS IN SPAIN

  CHAPTER VI. THE NEW-CHRISTIANS

  CHAPTER VII. THE PRIOR OF HOLY CROSS

  CHAPTER VIII. THE HOLY OFFICE IN SEVILLE

  CHAPTER IX. THE SUPREME COUNCIL

  CHAPTER X. THE JURISPRUDENCE OE THE HOLY OFFICE — THE FIRST “INSTRUCTIONS” OF TORQUEMADA

  CHAPTER XI. THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE HOLY OFFICE — THE MODE OF PROCEDURE

  CHAPTER XII. THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE HOLY OFFICE — THE AUDIENCE OF TORMENT

  CHAPTER XIII. THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE HOLY OFFICE — THE SECULAR ARM

  CHAPTER XIV. PEDRO ARBUES DE EPILA

  CHAPTER XV. TORQUEMADA’S FURTHER “INSTRUCTIONS”

  CHAPTER XVI. THE INQUISITION IN TOLEDO

  CHAPTER XVII. AUTOS DE FÉ

  CHAPTER XVIII. TORQUEMADA AND THE JEWS

  CHAPTER XIX. THE LEGEND OF THE SANTO NINO

  CHAPTER XX. THE ARREST OF YUCÉ FRANCO

  CHAPTER XXI. THE TRIAL OF YUCÉ FRANCO

  CHAPTER XXII. THE TRIAL OF Yucé FRANCO (Continued)

  CHAPTER XXIII. THE TRIAL OF YUCÉ FRANCO — (Concluded)

  CHAPTER XXIV. EPILOGUE TO THE AFFAIR OF THE SANTO NINO

  CHAPTER XXV. THE EDICT OF BANISHMENT

  CHAPTER XXVI. THE EXODUS FROM SPAIN

  CHAPTER XXVII. THE LAST “INSTRUCTIONS” OF TORQUEMADA

  El fuego está encendido, que quemará fasta que falle cabo al seco de la leña.

  — ANDRÉS BERNALDEZ: Historia de los Reyes Católicos, cap. xliv.

  PREFACE

  The history of Frey Tomás de Torquemada is the history of the establishment of the Modern Inquisition. It is not so much the history of a man as of an abstract genius presiding over a gigantic and cruel engine of its own perfecting. Of this engine we may examine for ourselves to-day the details of the complex machinery. Through the records that survive we may observe its cold, smooth action, and trace in this the awful intelligence of its architect. But of that architect himself we are permitted to catch no more than an occasional and fleeting glimpse. It is only in the rarest and briefest moments that he stands clearly before us, revealed as a man of flesh and blood.

  We see him, now fervidly urging a reluctant queen to do her duty by her God and unsheathe the sword of persecution, now harshly threatening his sovereigns with the wrath of Heaven when they are in danger of relenting in the wielding of that same sword. But in the main he must be studied, not in his actions, but in his enactments — the emanations of his relentless spirit. In these he is to be seen devoutly compassing evil in the perfervid quest of good.

  Untouched by worldly ambitions, he seems at once superhuman and less than human. Dauntless amid execrations, unmoved by plaudits, sublimely disdainful of temporal weal, in nothing is he so admirable as in the unfaltering self-abnegation with which he devotes himself to the service of his God, in nothing so terrible and tragically deplorable as in the actual service which he renders.

  “His history,” says Prescott, “may be thought to prove that of all human infirmities there is none productive of more extensive mischief to society than fanaticism.”

  To this day — four centuries after his passing — Spain still bears the imprint of his pitiless work, and none may deny the truth of Rosseuw St. Hilaire’s indictment that, after Philip II, Torquemada was the man who did most harm to the land that gave him birth.

  The materials for this history have been gathered from the sources cited in the appended bibliography, to all of which the author acknowledges his profound indebtedness. In particular, however, are his thanks due — as must be the thanks of all men who engage in studies of the Spanish Inquisition — to the voluminous, succinct, and enormously comprehensive works of Juan Antonio Llorente, a historian of unimpugned honesty and authority, who wrote under circumstances peculiarly advantageous and with qualifications peculiarly full.

  Juan Antonio Llorente was born at Logroño in 1756, and he was ordained priest in 1779, after a university course of Roman and Canon law which enabled him to obtain a place among the lawyers of the Supreme Council of Castile — i.e. the Council of the Inquisition. Having graduated as a Doctor of Canon Law, he discharged the duties of Vicar-General to the Bishop of Calahorra, and later on became the Commissary of the Holy Office in Logroño — for which it was necessary that he should prove that he was of “clean blood,” undefiled by the taint of Jew or Moor or heretic.

  In 1789 he was appointed Secretary-General to the Holy Office, an appointment which took him to Madrid, where he was well received by the King, who gave him a canonry of Calahorra.

  A profound student of sociological questions, with leanings towards rationalism, he provoked a certain degree of mistrust, and when the Liberal party fell from power and dragged with it many of those who had held offices of consequence, the young priest found himself not only deposed, but forced to meet certain minor charges, which resulted in his being sent into retreat in a convent for a month as a penance.

  Thereafter he concerned himself with educational matters until the coming of Bonaparte’s eagles into Spain. When that invasion took place, he hailed the French as the saviours of his country, and as a consequence found himself a member of the Assembly of Notables convoked by Murat to reform the Spanish Government. But most important of all, from our point of view, is the fact that when the Inquisition was abolished, in 1809, he accepted the charge of going through its vast archives, and he spent two years and employed a number of amanuenses in copying or making extracts of all that he considered of account.

  He held various offices of importance under the French Government, so that when this was finally expelled from Spain, he, too, was forced to go. He sought refuge in Paris, and there he wrote his famous “Historia Critica de la Inquisicion de España,” the crystallization of his vast researches.

  It was a very daring thing to have done, and, thanks to the royalist and clerical Government, he was not suffered to remain long unpunished. He was inhibited from hearing confession or celebrating Mass — practically unfrocked — and forbidden to teach the Castilian language in private schools. He hit back by publishing “The Political Portrait of the Popes,” which earned him orders to leave France immediately. He set out in December of 1822 to return to Spain, and died a few days after reaching Madrid, killed by the rigours of the journey at his advanced age.

  Although his “Critical History” displays at times a certain vehemence, in the main it is concerned with the sober transcription of the musty records he was privileged to explore.

  The Spanish Inquisition has been the subject of much unrestrained
and exaggerated writing, expressing points of view that are diametrically opposed. From such authors as Garcia Rodrigo, who laud its work of purification, misrepresent its scope, and deplore (in our own times) the extinction of that terrible tribunal, it is a far cry indeed to such writers as Dr. Rule, who dip their pens in the gall of an intolerance as virulent as that which they attack.

  The author has sought here to hold a course that is unencumbered by religious partisanship, treating purely as a phase of history the institution for which Torquemada was so largely responsible. He has not written in the Catholic interest, or the Protestant interest, or the Jewish interest, He holds the view that on the score of intolerance it is not for Christians to cast a stone at Jews, nor Jews at Christians, nor yet Christians of one sect at Christians of another. Each will find in his own history more than enough to answer for at the bar of Humanity. And when achievement is measured by opportunity, each will discover that he is entitled to fling at the others no reproaches which the others are not entitled to fling at him.

  If the Spanish Inquisition is here shown as a ruthless engine of destruction whose wheels drip the blood of mangled generations, yet it is very far from being implied that religious persecution is an offence peculiar to the Church of Rome.

  “She persecuted to the full extent of the power of her clergy, and that power was very great. The persecution of which every Protestant church was guilty was measured by the same rule, but clerical influence in Protestant countries was comparatively weak.”

  Thus Lecky, whom we quote lest any should be tempted to use anything in these pages as a weapon of unchristian Christian partisanship. Let any such remember that against Torquemada, who was unfortunately well served by opportunity, may be set the bloody-minded John Knox, who, fortunately for humanity, was not; let him ponder the slaughter of Presbyterians, Puritans, and Roman Catholics under Elizabeth; let him call to mind the persecutions of the Anabaptists under Edward VI, and the Anabaptists’ own clamour for the blood of all who were not re-baptized.