But Benito Garcia was stubborn and unyielding—a five-step man all the way. Even as his body was “prolonged” several inches in the “Question of the First Degree,” or put more precisely, as his muscles began to rip and his bones began to crack, he remained silent.
When the rack did not produce the desired result, the churchmen turned to the water torture. In this hideous remedy, the prisoner was tied to a ladder that was sloped downward, so that the head was lower than the feet. The head was held fast in position by a metal band, twigs were placed in the nostrils, and ropes winched tightly around his appendages. The mouth was forced open with a metal piece and a cloth placed over the mouth. Then a pitcher of water was brought, and water poured over the cloth. With each swallow, the cloth was drawn deeper into the throat, until in gagging and choking the victim nearly asphyxiated. The terror of suffocation was extreme, and the process was repeated endlessly, bloating the body grotesquely until the victim was ready to confess. If the suspect was still uncooperative, his body was turned over, causing unimaginable pain in the heart and the lungs. From the inquisitor’s standpoint—for he was there to record every detail—the treatment was easy to administer and left no telltale signs.
Garcia had been able to hold his tongue for a few days, but on the fifth day of torture, his resistance crumbled. Yes, he had been baptized thirty-five years before, he confessed, but five years ago he had lapsed back into Judaism. For the vicar this confession was not enough, for this was more than a run-of-the-mill case of false faith. The prelate sensed there was more to the story. With whom did he practice Jewish rites? For what purpose did he have a communion wafer in his possession?
Under the threat of more torture, Garcia blurted out an astonishing tale: At some time in the past two years, he, along with several Jews and conversos in his town, had engaged in a secret and magical rite with a human heart and a consecrated communion wafer. This powerful mixture was meant to create a toxin of mass destruction with marvelous results: the Inquisition would be blocked; all Christians would die raving mad; Jews would seize their property and take over the world. Whether in fact Benito blurted this out, or whether the tale came from the fertile imagination and ambition of the vicar, is unclear.
As usual, Garcia’s interrogator demanded the names of his co-conspirators as a signal of the prisoner’s sincerity, and the prisoner complied. Among the cohorts he named was a twenty-year-old Jew called Yuce Franco. When this young man was brought to Segovia and jailed there, he abruptly fell ill and appeared to be dying. Brazenly, he asked for a rabbi to be with him at death… and not just any rabbi, but the chief rabbi of the royal court, Abraham Senior. (This very request would later be held against Senior as the Inquisition attempted to undermine the power and influence of the court rabbi with the Spanish sovereigns.)
To the Inquisition, Franco’s request seemed like a stroke of good luck. The inquisitors regretted that they could not produce Abraham Senior, but instead a Dominican priest who was fluent in Hebrew was brought forward, dressed as a rabbi and sent to the dying man. The wolf in sheep’s clothing oozed with comfortable words. Before the dying man met his maker, he should unburden his conscience. Why had he been arrested? “For crucifying a child,” was Franco’s answer, but the sick man would say no more, except that he wanted to see Rabbi Abraham Senior. That appeal to the most influential Jew in Spain ended the farce.
Still, the outlines of a fantastic story were taking shape. Five years previously, Yuce Franco and Benito Garcia along with seven other men had supposedly participated in a secret diabolical rite known famously as “ritual murder.” The blood had come from a Christian boy whom they had murdered in a mock crucifixion to insult Christ, the story went.
And thus, the vicar’s torture chamber and the Jew’s deathbed had conjured up the most powerful and popular anti-Jewish myths of the past three hundred years into a single case. The background is important. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council (widely regarded as the most brilliant synod of the medieval Church to consider Church doctrine), the concept of transubstantiation (the transforming of the communion wafer into the actual body of Christ) had become official Church dogma. From that point forward, the communion wafer had taken on far-reaching magical importance. Within a few years of the Council, rumors of Jewish rites to mock and desecrate the consecrated host with nails and knives had become popular fare throughout the medieval Christian world. Because of the transformative properties of the consecrated Host, it was suggested that Jews who falsely professed to be Christians would often hold the wafer in their mouths, and then secretly remove it, place it in their pockets, and later, use it for diabolical incantations. Jews whose conversion to Christianity had been forced were especially afraid that by ingesting the wafer, their conversion might become sincere. For Benito Garcia, overwhelmed with guilt for having forsaken the faith of his fathers and finally having sought to recover his ancestral Judaism, a consecrated wafer in his mouth was a desecration in reverse.
“Ritual murder” had popularly come to mean the actual murder of a Christian boy at Easter time or at Passover in a cynical mockery of Christ’s Crucifixion. Occasionally, the libel was linked with the Jewish celebration of Purim, when events in the book of Esther in which Queen Esther rescued the Jews from a threat of massacre by the king’s lieutenant, Haman, are commemorated; the feast features a reenactment of the execution of an enemy of the Jews. The myth of ritual murder, or “the libel,” as it is sometimes called, was a thousand years old, and rumors of murder and mock crucifixion throughout Europe had wide popular currency.
In the first rudimentary laws of Christian Spain, known as Las Siete Partidas, there was specific language forbidding the practice. “We have heard it said that in certain places on Good Friday the Jews do steal children and set them on the cross in a mocking manner.” A hundred years later, Geoffrey Chaucer gave ritual murder a place in literature in the story entitled “The Prioress’s Tale” in his Canterbury Tales. The desecration of the Host and the ritual murder were linked with yet another myth known as the “blood accusation,” in which allegedly Jews mixed Christian blood into their recipes for unleavened bread at Passover time. Therefore, supposedly, Jews needed Christian blood every year.
And so in the Garcia case, all three myths were combined in a powerful blend of magic, heresy, superstition, murder, poison, blood, and sacrilege, whose purpose was the very destruction of Christianity itself. The great sorcerer himself, the Devil, or his agent, the Antichrist, were supposed to be behind these evil practices. In the mind of the Jew hater, the reappearance of the Antichrist on earth was said to be the equivalent for Jews of the return of Jesus Christ for the Christians. And when the Antichrist returned, he and his Jewish agents would take over the world.
To support this relationship between the Devil and the Jews, and to rationalize their extreme hatred of Jews, medieval clerics, including the ambitious vicar of Astorga, found support for their rabid hatred in several biblical references. They pointed to chapter 8, verse 44 in the Gospel of St. John about the Jews: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Or even more pointedly, they invoked two verses in the book of Revelation: “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou are rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan” (2:9) and again at 3:9: “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie…”
And thus, in some remote cave outside the village of La Guardia, the synagogue of the Devil had produced this profane sacrilege. As the strands of the story came together in Astorga, the investigation would take complicated twists and turns. Yuce Franco recovered his health and refused to say more. The other ritualists, however, told widely different stories. Between them, probably through repe
ated tortures, enough wildly salacious and highly imaginative quotes were elicited. One witness reported that at the point of the boy’s crucifixion, the young Jew, Yuce Franco, had exclaimed,
“Die, little traitor, enemy of ours who goes about deceiving the world with your lies, and who calls himself the savior of our world and the King of the Jews.”
To which another cries out, “Crucify this charlatan who calls himself our King and who says that he has within him the power to destroy our temple, and who through spells and magic claims to be able to kill us and carry out revenge upon us. Crucify him, the dog, crucify him!”
And when it was over, the heart was placed in a box and mixed with the consecrated Host, and the sorcerer of the group waved his arms and said his magic words over the confection to conjure up the destruction of Christianity.
The case had become too big and important to be handled locally. And so, with pride in his vigilance in the face of heresy, the vicar of Astorga sent his report directly to the Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada.
In the latter half of 1490, the Grand Inquisitor was well pleased with the situation. He had become the third most powerful man in Spain and virtually independent from his titular leader in Rome. His institution was well established in all of Christian Spain, and he essentially had a free hand while the sovereigns were preoccupied with the war in the south. In the nine years of the Spanish Inquisition, some three thousand heretics had been burned at the stake, and thirty thousand lesser strays had been “penanced” with lighter sentences. His home base remained the Dominican monastery of San Tomás in the suburbs of Ávila. As he let his mind rest on his national reach, he must have been flattered not only at the millions who feared him but also those legions who hated him.
He was, of course, in constant danger of assassination. As a result, in what seems like a touch of uncharacteristic whimsy, his desk was adorned with a sculpture of a unicorn’s horn that was believed to ward off the effects of poison. When he traveled, which was often, an escort of fifty cavalrymen and two hundred foot soldiers accompanied him. He slept in palaces throughout the land, but usually on the floor in his hair shirt.
In one respect, Ferdinand and Isabella had frustrated his ambitions. As part of the purification of Spain and the final victory of Catholicism there, Torquemada passionately wanted to drive all Jews from the peninsula. Across Europe there was precedent for this extreme measure. England had expelled its Jews in 1290; France had tried the same measure several times (though its sway was temporary); and a number of provinces in Germany had expelled their Jews, accompanying the expedient with bloody pogroms.
Isabella especially was resistant to the idea of expulsion, no doubt in part due to the influence of the powerful court rabbis, Abraham Senior and Isaac Abravanel. But Torquemada knew how to manage the monarchs. With Ferdinand, he could appeal to money. With Isabella, he could appeal to her piety, her desire for public happiness, her stature as the Virgin Mary incarnate or the Spanish version of the Apocalyptic Woman, portrayed in the book of Revelation, chapter 12, verse 1: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars…” He remembered well that Isabella had also been adverse to the establishment of the Inquisition itself, but she had been won over by outside pressure. What Torquemada needed now was a lurid event that might inflame public hysteria against the Jews.
In the nine conspirators of La Guardia who were in his possession, the Grand Inquisitor saw a gift. Torquemada took personal charge of the investigation. For the hands-on interrogation of the case, he appointed three inquisitors, awarding the vicar of Astorga, Pedro de Villanda, one of the posts. Six months of interrogation ensued, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively in groups of three. Along the way, torture was frequent, pitiless, unrelenting. In the process, three of the Jewish suspects died. The problem with so much torture was that the victim was predisposed to say anything, having constantly to guess what magic words he might utter to stop the winches.
Inevitably, nine different stories emerged. The nine could not agree on the year of the supposed crime, nor the age of the victim who was professed to be somewhere between three and eight years old. There was no good answer to the question of motive: why would Jews who were not subject to the Inquisition risk involvement in so dangerous a ceremony? Some confessed that only the human heart had been brought to the cave, others that there were two hearts and two communion wafers. Still others testified that the boy had been brought alive and crucified in the cave, while another desperate babbler added the neat detail that the boy had been lashed 5,500 times on his way to the cave, five more than Jesus Christ was believed to have received on his way to Calvary.
From somewhere else a bit of interesting dialogue was salted into the ever-embroidered story. With the martyr’s chest wide open, Benito García searched around in the gore, while the boy said calmly,
“What are you looking for, Jew?… if for my heart, you will find it on the other side.”
Besides the inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions of the testimony, there was the problem of the martyr’s identity. The Inquisition initiated a widespread manhunt. By one account the boy hailed from Quintanar, a town southeast of Toledo. But no report of a missing child had been filed there. Indeed, no child had been reported missing anywhere in the province of Toledo. No grieving mother turned up. One prisoner confessed to having buried the child after the ritual and provided the coordinates of the grave. But no grave and no body were found, only a little disturbed dirt at the designated spot. Finally, the Inquisition settled on the canard that Benito García had picked up an urchin in front of the Cathedral of Toledo. Predictably, they gave the martyr the name of Cristóbal. To account for the lack of a distraught mother, it was announced that the holy child was the offspring of a blind woman!
After sixteen months of investigation and torture, the Inquisition gave up on blending the testimony into a consistent, plausible story. Plausibility was no hurdle, and there was no court of appeal. Two juries examined the case. The first comprised seven noted scholars from Salamanca University who proclaimed the guilt of the accused. The second comprised five “learned men” from Ávila who seconded the decision of the first.
Their decision was unanimous.
A day after the sentence was announced, the Inquisition warned the local populace not to talk about the discrepancies and insufficiencies of the testimony. In so doing, a proverbial phrase was used. One should not gossip, “porque el asno está enalbardado—
… because the ass is saddled.“
The veneration of the child martyr began immediately after the execution of the conspirators. The Holy Innocent of La Guardia was compared to St. Hugh the Little, the nine-year-old boy from Lincoln, England, who had supposedly been the victim of a similar ritual killing in 1255 and had continued to sing sweetly, due to the intervention of the Virgin Mary, even after his throat had been slit. Nineteen Jews had been executed for that act, and the case was later invoked by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, when he referred to the Jewish quarters as the “waspish nest” of Satan and proclaimed, “O cursed folk of Herod come again/Of what avail your villainous intent?” The Prioress concludes her tale this way:
O yong Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also
With cursed Jews, as it is notable,
For it is but a litel whyle ago;
Pray eek for us, we sinnful folk unstable
That of his mercy, God so merciable
On us his grete mercy multiplye,
For reverence of his moder Marye. Amen.
According to the Church, miracles followed quickly on the heels of the sentence. The holy child-martyr became the patron saint of the village of La Guardia. It was reported that the boy’s mother had come forward and was found to have recovered her sight! The devout prayed for the recovery of the child’s bones, but when they did not turn up, it was proclaimed that from the spot of disturbed earth, th
e Almighty had taken the remains to heaven on the third day after the boy’s crucifixion. It was added that his mother had regained her eyesight exactly three days after her son’s death, or at the very moment when her son’s body was being lifted to heaven by God. The consecrated Host, which had been found initially in Benito Garcia’s knapsack, had been secretly kept within the leaves of a Book of Hours. The purported book was put on display in Torquemada’s Convent of San Tomás and was later credited with protecting Ávila from an outbreak of the plague. Several hundred years later, the book was still on display, its pages still sparkling and limber and uncorrupted as if they had been printed the day before.
In time, the Holy Innocent of La Guardia moved from religious fable into Spanish literature. The story was to have lasting power, especially in later centuries when the flames of anti-Semitism were fanned. Passion plays were written about the episode, as well as poetry. A hundred years after the episode, in 1592, a Spanish poet named Jerónimo Ramírez wrote an epic poem in Latin, divided into six books about the “passion of the Innocent Martyr of La Guardia.” Written in the first person as verse directed to the Almighty, four lines convey its spirit.
La Guardia turns its devoted face to You
and watches the body of the boy carried over the rocks
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