Llorente also relates, from the original records, another case quite as
cruel and unjust as the above. "On the 8th day of December, 1528, one
Catalina, a woman of BAD CHARACTER, informed the inquisitors that,
EIGHTEEN YEARS BEFORE she had lived in the house with a Morisco named
Juan, by trade a coppersmith, and a native of Segovia; that she had
observed that neither he nor his children ate pork or drank wine, and
that, on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings they used to wash their
feet, which custom, as well as abstinence from pork and wine, was
peculiar to the Moors. The old man was at that time an inhabitant of
Benevente, and seventy-one years of age. But the inquisitors at once
summoned him into their presence, and questioned him at three several
interviews. All that he could tell was, that he received baptism when he
was forty-five years of age; that having never eaten pork or drunk wine,
he had no taste for them; and that, being coppersmiths, they found it
necessary to wash themselves thoroughly once a week. After some other
examinations, they sent him back to Benevente, with prohibition to go
beyond three leagues' distance from the town. Two years afterwards the
inquisitor determined that he should be threatened with torture, IN
ORDER TO OBTAIN INFORMATION THAT MIGHT HELP THEM TO CRIMINATE OTHERS.
He was accordingly taken to Valladolid, and in a subterranean chamber,
called the 'chamber, or dungeon, of torment,' stripped naked, and bound
to the 'ladder.' This might well have extorted something like confession
from an old man of seventy-one; but he told them that whatever he might
say when under torture would be merely extorted by the extreme anguish,
and therefore unworthy of belief; that he would not, through fear of
pain, confess what had never taken place. They kept him in close prison
until the next Auto de Fe, when he walked among the penitents, with a
lighted candle in his hand, and, after seeing others burnt to death,
paid the holy office a fee of four ducats, and went home, not acquitted,
but released. He was not summoned again, as he died soon afterwards."
It sometimes happened that an individual was arrested by mistake, and
a person who was entirely innocent was tortured instead of the real or
supposed criminal. A case of this kind Mr. Bower found related at length
in the "Annals of the Inquisition at Macerata."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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