Since the establishment of the Inquisition, religious persecutions had become but too gratifying to the national taste. On this occasion at Málaga, the apostate Moors were first caught and burned. Twelve apostate Christians were then fastened to stakes in an open place and made the barbarous sport of Spanish cavaliers, who, mounted on fleet horses, hurled at their naked bodies pointed reeds while rushing past at full speed. This was continued until the torn and bleeding flesh of their victims was filled with darts, and the wretched sufferers expired under the most excruciating torments. Then, of the rest of the Moorish prisoners, three divisions were made; one for the redemption of Christian captives, one to be distributed among the victors as slaves, and one to be publicly sold into slavery. Spanish knights returned from their incursions against the Moors with strings of turbaned heads hanging from their saddle-bows, which, as they passed along, they threw to the boys in the streets, in order to inspire their youthful minds with hatred to the foes of their religion. From making slaves of prisoners of war, a traffic in human flesh springs up. A slave-trade association was formed in Portugal in 1443. Gonzalez brought slaves to Seville; Columbus sent to Spain a cargo of Indian slaves in 1495; in 1503 the enslavement of American Indians was authorized by Ferdinand and Isabella; and in 1508 the African slave-trade unfolded in all its hideous barbarity. The slave-trade, however, was tolerated by these sovereigns from mistaken kindness, rather than from cruelty. It was to shield the Indian, who died under the infliction of labor, that Isabella permitted the importation of Africans into the colonies. [Sidenote: CIVILIZED TORTURES.] Cruelty was a prominent wheel in the machinery of government, as well as in religious discipline. Torture was deemed inseparable from justice, either as preparatory to trial to elicit a confession of guilt, or as part of an execution to increase the punishment. Hippolite de Marsilli, a learned jurisconsult of Bologna, mentioned fourteen ways of inflicting torture, which are given by Lacroix. Among them were compressing the limbs with instruments or cords; the injection of water, vinegar, or oil; application of hot pitch; starvation; placing hot eggs under the armpits; introducing dice under the skin; tying lighted candles to the fingers which were consumed with the wax, and dropping water from a great height upon the stomach. Josse Damhoudere mentioned thirteen modes of execution or punishment—fire, the sword, mechanical force, quartering, the wheel, the fork, the gibbet, dragging, spiking, cutting off the ears, dismembering, hogging, and the pillory. Every country had its peculiar system of torture.