None were spared, but the most exalted were the first to be laid low; judges and municipal officers, noblemen, and even clergymen suspected of Judaism were mysteriously snatched from their homes, conveyed to the subterranean dungeons of the Inquisition, and there, amid the terrors of darkness and solitude, were kept for a while in strict ignorance of the specific crime with which they were charged. When sufficiently bewildered in his lonely, cold, and lightless cell, the prisoner was dragged before the court and asked to give straight and lucid answers to crooked and vague questions. It was accepted as a principle of judicial procedure that every prisoner was guilty until he proved himself to be innocent, and that it was better that ten innocents should suffer than one infidel escape. Denial of guilt was visited with torture, persistence in denial with more torture, and confession of sin--to obtain which was an essential element in the Inquisitorial process--with sentence of death or confiscation of goods, the greater part of which went to defray the expenses of the prisoner’s trial and to fill the pockets of his judges, while the remainder was swallowed up by the Royal Treasury. Thus the martyrs, mangled by the rack, emaciated by privation, and almost maddened by mental suffering, were led to the place of execution. The spectacle partook of the pomp of a Roman pageant and of the horror of a cannibal feast. Noble Castilians, arrayed in the dark livery of the Holy Office, disdained not to act as banner-bearers and body-guards to the monastic executioners. A brilliant throng of gorgeously apparelled ecclesiastics added to the magnificence of the procession and enhanced by contrast the humiliation of the convicts, who, clad in coarse yellow frocks made hideous with a scarlet cross and designs of demons and hell-flames, haggard and already half-dead with torture and terror, tottered to the funeral pyre. This was piled on the Quemadero--a spacious stone platform, with the statues of the four major prophets erected at the four corners, to which the victims were bound. The semi-decomposed bodies of those convicted after death, torn out of their tombs, were placed upon the pile, the fuel was ignited, and the same flames gradually and slowly reduced the quick and the dead to ashes.