In considering the personnel of the tribunal, we may dismiss the assessor with a few words. Such an official was unknown in the Old Inquisition, but we have seen that, when the first inquisitors were sent to Seville, they were accompanied by an assessor, and such a functionary continued for some time to be considered a necessary adjunct to a tribunal. At the beginning the inquisitors were Dominican friars, presumably good theologians but unversed in the intricacies of the law. It was therefore desirable to associate with them a lawyer as a guide, and his presence moreover might serve as an assurance to the people of the legality of the proceedings. In Torquemada's instructions of 1485 it is provided that they must always act in concert and that anything done by one without the other was invalid; even communications to the Suprema must be signed by both.[640] In the trials of this period we sometimes find the assessor sitting with the inquisitors and sometimes not, and the sentences are rendered by the latter with the concurrence of the former.[641] In the secular law of the period, the assessor had only a consultative and not a decisive vote, and this would appear to be his position in the tribunal, when the routine of the Inquisition had established its own precedents, when all doubtful questions were decided by the Suprema and the services of trained lawyers were no longer required.[642] In the early time their salaries were the same as those of the inquisitors--indeed, at Saragossa, in 1486, Martin Martínez, the assessor, receives five thousand sueldos while the inquisitors are rated at four thousand.[643] It was not long, however, before it apparently became indifferent whether there was an assessor or not. In 1499, the salary lists of Seville, of Burgos and of Palencia have no mention of such an official, while there is one at Saragossa and, in 1500, Ferdinand empowers the inquisitor of Sardinia to select for his assessor any doctor he pleases.[644] The office continued to exist for a time, as a kind of supernumerary, employed in hearing the civil cases of officials but, in the Aragonese Concordia of 1568, this duty was placed on the inquisitors and the assessorship was abolished. In Castile, the list of officials, promulgated in the same year by Philip II, as entitled to exemption from taxation, makes no mention of the assessor, who may be assumed by this time to disappear.[645]