Fortunately, the vindictive schemes of Pope Benedict never came into active operation. While he was still engaged in tormenting the Jews, the council of Constance decreed his deposition. As he had obstinately opposed the advice of the king, Don Ferdinand, and the German emperor, Sigismund, to lay aside the tiara of his own initiative, he was abandoned by his Spanish protectors. The weapons he had employed recoiled upon himself. His last adherents were drawn from him by Vincent Ferrer's fanatical preaching. The flagellant priest not only exhorted the king of Aragon to renounce "this unfrocked and spurious pope," but he held forth everywhere--in the churches and the open streets--that "a man like this pope deserves to be pursued to death by every right-thinking Christian." Deserted by his protectors, his friends, and even his protégés, there now remained to Pedro de Luna, of all his possessions, only the small fortress of Peñiscola, and even here King Ferdinand, urged on by Santa Maria, the pope's creature, threatened him with a siege. In the end this ambitious and obstinate man covered himself with ridicule by attempting to continue to play the part of pope in his tiny palace. He appointed a college of four cardinals, and pledged them before his death not to recognize the pope elected at Constance, but to choose a successor from among their own body. When he died, his college elected two popes instead of one. Such was the infallibility of the church, into the pale of which it was sought to force the Jews. What became of the malicious apostate, Joshua Lorqui-Geronimo de Santa Fé, after the fall of his master, is not known. In Jewish circles he was remembered by the well-earned sobriquet of "The Calumniator" (Megadef). King Ferdinand of Aragon, who had always allowed himself to be influenced by enemies of the Jews, died in 1416. His death was followed, after a short interval, by that of the Jew-hating regent, Catalina of Castile, the instrument of Vincent's Jew-hunt (1418), and finally by that of Vincent himself (1419), who had the mortification to see the flagellant movement, to which he owed his saintly reputation, condemned by the council of Constance, he himself being compelled to disband his "white troop."