The Inquisition had been in existence for three days when six wretches suffered at the stake. Seventeen more followed in March, and at the end of ten months the “bag” had reached the number of two hundred and ninety-eight, in Seville alone, in addition to many effigies of those who had been fortunate enough to escape. The plague which devastated Seville in that year of evil omen did not interrupt the other plague. The Inquisition once more moved its racks, and continued its infernal work in Aracena. Meanwhile, its branch establishments carried on a brisk business in human lives in other parts of Andalusia, and their diligence is proved by the fact, which we owe to the Jesuit historian Mariana, that the net total of victims for the year amounted to two thousand burnt alive, and seventeen thousand sentenced to loss of property, loss of civil rights, or incarceration--mercies which figured in the balance sheet under the comprehensive euphemism “reconciliation.” ♦1483♦ In the third year Thomas de Torquemada was appointed by Sixtus IV. Inquisitor-General of Castile and Aragon, invested with full powers to draw up a new constitution for the Holy Office. His labours resulted in the modern Inquisition, which for centuries after blasted the Iberian Peninsula and supplied historians, novelists, and dramatists with an inexhaustible mine of horrors. The Spaniards were not pleased to see the extension of the grim tribunal’s operations, and Pedro Arbués, the first Inquisitor who, in spite of popular protests, ventured to make his appearance in Aragon, was murdered in the Cathedral of Saragossa. ♦1485♦ But all opposition was soon silenced. Year after year edicts were issued and read in every church on the first two Sundays of Lent, spurring the faithful, on pain of eternal damnation, to denounce their fellow-citizens, and often their nearest and dearest; for loyalty to the cause cancelled all other bonds. Neither friendship nor family affection was permitted to interfere with the course of fanaticism, and the vilest crimes against nature and morality were hallowed by the blessings of the Church. The Marranos and their Jewish sympathisers and abettors, against whom the terrible engine continued to be almost exclusively directed under Torquemada’s management, were decimated, mulcted, and mutilated at the average annual rate of six thousand roasted or “reconciled,” not including an unknown number of orphaned children doomed to starvation or vice by the confiscation of their patrimony.