The fanaticism aroused by Alfonso de Spina was by no means without effect; indeed, the most lamentable consequences ere long resulted from it. A monk, crucifix in hand, proposed a general massacre of the Jews of Medina del Campo, near Valladolid, and his words were favorably received. The inhabitants of the town fell upon the Jews, and burnt several of them alive with the sacred books which they happened to find in their possession. Murder was naturally followed by plunder of the victims' goods. The king had the ringleaders of this outrage punished; but this was all that he could do. He was unable to prevent a recurrence of such scenes. He had been compelled to recognize the abject position of the Jews officially in the statute book which his advisers, his secret enemies, Don Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, and the Count of Valencia, prepared at his request. Don Pacheco, who by his intrigues brought both king and country to confusion, was himself of Jewish blood, his mother, who had married a Spanish noble, being the daughter of a Jew named Ruy Capron. Notwithstanding this fact, he included the most odious enactments in Don Henry's revised statute book. All the earlier disabilities were revived: the exclusion of Jews from all offices, even from practice as apothecaries, the wearing of distinctive badges, restriction to the Jewries of towns, and even confinement to their houses during Holy Week. The civil war kindled by the intrigues of Don Pacheco and other courtiers through the burlesque deposition of Don Henry in Avila, and the coronation of his younger brother, Alfonso, bore more heavily on the Jews than even on the general population of Castile. In 1467 Alfonso's party had by treason become master of Segovia, and immediately a riot against the Jews began here. The enemies of this unhappy people spread the report that, on the suggestion of their rabbi, Solomon Picho, the Jews of the little community of Sepulveda, not far from Segovia, had during Holy Week so cruelly tortured a Christian child that it died upon the cross (April, 1468). On the motion of Bishop Juan Arias, of Avila, of Jewish race, several Jews (eight or sixteen, according to different accounts), whom the popular voice had accused, were hauled from Sepulveda to Segovia, and there condemned to the stake, the gallows and the bowstring, whereupon the Christians of Sepulveda fell upon the few remaining Jews of the community, massacred some, and hunted the rest from the neighborhood. Is it not strange that in Castile and in Silesia, in Italy and in Poland, the selfsame accusations were raised, and followed by the same sentences?