issued for Castile and the utterance is important as embodying the first absolute demand for proofs of limpieza and as marking the extravagant extension of the rule to wives. This royal cédula was interpreted as applicable to existing incumbents, and investigations as to their genealogies were set on foot, with the intention of weeding out at least the familiars who were not limpios. Several efforts had already been made to this effect after the Castile Concordia of 1553, without apparent result, and it was now undertaken again with instructions that, if any were found to be Conversos, they were to be dismissed without assigning a reason.[866] It was a work ungrateful both to the investigators and investigated and dragged along in the most perfunctory fashion. Cartas acordadas in 1567 and 1575 called for lists of those who had been investigated and those who had not and, when it came to taking action, the habitual tenderness manifested toward officials was displayed in orders issued in 1572 and again in 1582 that if any officials, commissioners or familiars, were found lacking in the requisite qualifications, they were to be reported to the Suprema without dismissing them.[867] [Sidenote: _LIMITATIONS DISREGARDED_] As a matter of course the test was applied to all new appointments and no one was admitted to office in any capacity in the Inquisition who was not free from the _mancha_ of Jewish or Moorish blood or of ancestral punishment. Even for temporary employment, limpieza was essential. In his visitation of the Canaries, in 1574, the Inspector Bravo de Zayas brought an accusation, against the Inquisitor Ortiz de Funes, of appointing officials without preliminary investigation, the cases being two emergency appointments to fill temporary vacancies, and the appointees being _montañeses_, or highlanders from the northern provinces of Spain, where purity of blood was presumable--to say nothing of the fact that an investigation would probably have consumed a year or two.[868] Yet this was but the natural expression of the infatuation which had taken possession of Spain. In 1595, Philip II, in his instructions to Manrique de Lara, lays especial stress on the importance of limpieza. Investigation as to this and as to habits must be made with the utmost rigor and no dispensations must be granted. No examinations are to be made before the party is selected, because otherwise, if he is not appointed owing to other reasons, it may be ascribed to a _mancha_ and thus undeserved infamy be cast upon an entire kindred.[869] Strangely enough, however, the inquisitor-general himself was never required to furnish proofs of purity of blood.[870]