The tendency to discriminate against Conversos was stimulated by the disabilities inflicted under the canon law on the children and grandchildren of impenitent heretics. This will be treated more fully hereafter and it suffices to say here that it was construed as applying to the children and grandchildren of all condemned or reconciled by the Inquisition. It was the subject of some debate, and the Instructions of 1488 required inquisitors to enforce by heavy penalties the incapacity of such descendants to hold any public office or to be admitted to holy orders.[831] These disabilities were extended still further by the sovereigns, in two pragmáticas of 1501, forbidding the children and grandchildren by the male line and the children by the female to hold any office of honor or to be notaries, scriveners, physicians, surgeons, or apothecaries. These pragmáticas were promptly sent by the Suprema to all tribunals, with orders for their strict enforcement, as the sovereigns did not permit exceptions to be made.[832] In this rising tide of proscription it is pleasant to find an exception. There was no more uncompromising defender of the faith than Ximenes but, in organizing his University of Alcalá, he made no discrimination against Conversos. In his carefully elaborated details as to qualifications for professorships, fellowships, degrees and the other objects of academic ambition, there is not a word indicating that the taint of Jewish or Moorish blood was an obstacle.[833] It was doubtless this which excepted Alcalá from the ominous decree of the Suprema, November 20, 1522, prohibiting Salamanca, Valladolid and Toledo from conferring degrees upon any convert from Judaism, or on any son or grandson of one condemned by the Inquisition.[834] Where it found warrant for such assumption of authority it might be difficult to say, but the effect of such proscription can scarce be exaggerated, in thus barring the way to all the learned professions and consequently to public employment and ecclesiastical preferment. The next step was taken by the Observantine Franciscans who, in 1525, procured from Clement VII a brief providing that in Spain no fraile descended from Jews, or from one convicted by the Inquisition, should be promoted to any office or dignity, and that thereafter no one laboring under such defect should be admitted into the Order.[835]