Christians should certainly abstain from the medicines of Jewish or Moorish physicians, unless compounded by Christian hands; but this did not mean that skillful doctors of the Jewish or the Mahometan faith should not be consulted, or their medicines not used, when no Christian physician was available. Juan II imposed upon the magistracy the duty of safeguarding the Jews and Mahometans, as objects of his special protection, and instructed them to punish Christian offenders with imprisonment and confiscation of goods. He furthermore ordered that his pleasure be made known throughout the land by public criers, in the presence of a notary. Whether this sophistical decree was of any real use to the Jews is doubtful. Don Juan II had not much authority in his kingdom, and was obliged to make frequent concessions to hostile parties, with whom his own son occasionally made common cause. The Castilian Jews were consequently abandoned to the arbitrary authority of the local magistrates during the remainder of the reign of this well-meaning but weak monarch, and were obliged to come to terms with them whenever protection was required against violence or false accusations. Did any misfortune threaten a Jew, then the tailor would fly to his princely patron, or the goldsmith to a grandee of high position, and seek to avert it by supplications or gold. It was truly no enviable situation in which the Jews found themselves. Eugenius' successor, Pope Nicholas V (March, 1447-March, 1455), continued the system of degrading and oppressing the Jews. As soon as he ascended the throne of St. Peter he devoted himself to abolishing the privileges of the Italian Jews, which Martin V had confirmed and Eugenius had not formally revoked, and subjecting them to exceptional laws. In a bull, dated June 23d, 1447, he repeated for Italy the restrictions which his predecessor had formulated for Castile, re-enacting them in the fullest detail, not even omitting the prohibition against the lighting of fires for Jews on the Sabbath. But though Nicholas' bull was only a copy, it had much more real force than the original; for its execution was confided to the pitiless Jew-hater and heretic-hunter, John of Capistrano. On him devolved the duty of seeing, either in person or through his brother Franciscans, that the provisions of the bull were literally obeyed, and infractions strictly punished. If, for example, a Jewish physician provided a suffering Christian with the means of regaining health, Capistrano was authorized to confiscate the whole of the offender's fortune and property. And the saintly monk, with heart of stone, was just the man to visit such a transgression with unrelenting severity.