Sixtus seems to have allowed five months to elapse before answering this defiance, but in the meanwhile the Inquisition went on as before. Ferdinand had formed in Valencia a special council for the Holy Office and this body ventured to remonstrate with him about the confiscations and especially the feature of sequestration, by which, as soon as an arrest was made, the whole property of the accused was seized and held; this was peculiarly oppressive and the council represented that it violated the fueros granted by King Jaime and King Alfonso, but Ferdinand replied, September 11th, that he was resolved that nothing belonging to him should be lost but should be rigidly collected, while what belonged to others should not be taken. Another letter of September 6th to the Governor Luis Cabanilles refers to an arrangement of a kind that became frequent, under which the Conversos agreed to pay a certain sum as a composition for the confiscations of those who might be proved to be heretics.[619] [Sidenote: _CRISTOBAL GUALBES_] At length, on October 9th, Sixtus replied to Ferdinand in a manner to show that he was open to accommodation. The new rules, he said, had been drawn up with the advice of the cardinals deputed for the purpose; they had scattered in fear of the impending pestilence but, when they should return to Rome, he would charge them to consider maturely whether the bull should be amended; meanwhile he suspended it in so far as it contravened the common law, only charging the inquisitors to observe strictly the rules of the common law--the "common law" here being an elastic expression, certain to be construed as the traditional inquisitorial system.[620] Thus the unfortunate Conversos of Aragon, as we shall see hereafter were those of Castile, were merely used as pawns in the pitiless game of king and pope over their despoilment and the merciful prescriptions of the bull of April 18th were only of service in showing that, in his subsequent policy, Sixtus sinned against light and knowledge. What negotiations followed, the documents at hand fail to reveal, but an understanding was inevitable as soon as the two powers could agree upon a division of the spoil. It required a twelvemonth to effect this and in the settlement Ferdinand secured more than he had at first demanded. It was no longer a question of commissioning a fraile to appoint inquisitors at his pleasure, but of including in the organization of the Castilian Inquisition the whole of the Spanish dominions. On October 17, 1483, the agreement was ratified by a bull appointing Torquemada as inquisitor of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, with power to appoint subordinates. In this, with characteristic shamelessness, Sixtus declares that he is only discharging his duty as pope, while his tender care for the reputation of the Dominicans is manifested by his omitting to prescribe that the local inquisitors should be members of that Order, the only qualification required being