If no error is more gross than to suppose that the establishment of the Inquisition was due to popular feeling in Spain, it is almost equally false to assert that it was the work of the contemporary popes. Rome was bad enough at the end of the fifteenth century; but her vast load of wickedness need not be increased by the burden of sins that are not her own. The everlasting shame of the Spanish Inquisition is that of the Catholic kings. It is not difficult to understand why the poor and rapacious Ferdinand of Aragon should welcome the establishment of an instrument of extortion which placed at his disposal the accumulated savings of the richest citizens of Castile. It is yet easier to comprehend that Isabella, who was not of a temper to brook resistance to authority in Church or State, should have consented to what her husband so earnestly desired. The queen, moreover, was at least sincerely religious, after the fashion of the day; and was constrained to follow the dictates of her confessor in matters judged by him to be within his spiritual jurisdiction, even while she was, as a civil ruler, withstanding the Pope himself on matters of temporal sovereignty. It is the height of folly to brand Isabella as a hypocrite, because we are unable to follow the workings of a medieval mind, or to appreciate the curious religious temper--by no means confined to the men and women of the fifteenth century--that can permit or compel the same person to be devoted to Popery and to be at war with the Pope, and find in the punctilious observance of ceremonial duty excuse or encouragement for the gratification of any vice and the commission of any crime. But that the nobility and people of Castile should have permitted the crown to impose upon them a foreign and an ecclesiastical despotism, is at first sight much harder to understand. No one reason, but an unhappy combination of causes, may perhaps be found to explain it. The influence of the queen was great. Respected as well as feared by the nobles, she was long admired and beloved by the mass of the people.[6] The great success of her administration, which was apparent even by the end of 1480; her repression of the nobility; her studied respect for the Cortes; all these things predisposed the Castilians, who had so long suffered under weak and unworthy sovereigns, to trust themselves not only to the justice but to the wisdom of the queen. The influence of the clergy, if not so great as it was in France or Italy, was no doubt considerable, and, as a rule, though not always, it was cast on the side of the Inquisition. Last and most unhappy reason of all, the nobility and the people were divided; and, if not actually hostile, were at least ever at variance in Castile.