Yet such were the convictions of the period, in the fifteenth century after Christ had died for man, that this crime against humanity met with nothing but applause among contemporaries. Men might admit that it was unwise from the point of view of statesmanship and damaging to the prosperity of the land, but this only enhanced the credit due to the sovereigns whose piety was equal to the sacrifice. When, in 1495, Alexander VI granted to them the proud title of Catholic Kings, the expulsion of the Jews was enumerated among the services to the faith entitling them to this distinction.[415] Even so liberal and cultured a thinker as Gian Pico della Mirandola, praises them for it, while he admits that even Christians were moved to pity by the calamities of the sufferers, nearly all of whom were consumed by shipwreck, pestilence and hunger, rendering the destruction equal to that inflicted by Titus and Hadrian.[416] It is true that Machiavelli, faithful to his general principles, seeks to find in Ferdinand's participation a political rather than a religious motive, but even he characterizes the act as a _pietosa crudeltà_.[417] So far, indeed, was it from being a cruelty, in the eyes of the theologians of the period, that Ferdinand was held to have exercised his power mercifully, for Arnaldo Albertino proved by the canon law that he would have been fully justified in putting them all to the sword and seizing their property.[418] * * * * * The Edict of Expulsion proclaimed to the world the policy which in its continuous development did so much for the abasement of Spain. At the same time it closed the career of avowed Jews in the Spanish dominions. Henceforth we shall meet with them as apostate Christians, the occasion and the victims of the Inquisition. CHAPTER IV. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INQUISITION.