But it was not only at Saragossa that opposition was offered to the establishment of the new Tribunal. In every part of Aragon and of Valencia; at Lerida, at Teruel, at Barcelona, the people rose against this new exhibition of royal and priestly tyranny. And it was not for fully two years, and after the adoption of the most savage measures of repression both royal and ecclesiastical, that the Inquisition was finally accepted in the kingdom of Aragon, and that Torquemada, fortified by no less than two special Bulls, made his triumphal entry as Inquisitor-general into Barcelona on the 27th of October, 1488. Among all the tens of thousands of innocent persons who were tortured and done to death by the Inquisition in Spain, it is instructive to turn to the record of one man at least who broke through the meshes of the ecclesiastical net that was spread abroad in the country; for the mode of his escape is sufficiently instructive. Ready money at command, but not exposed to seizure, was the sole shield and safeguard against the assaults of Church and State. Don Alfonso de la Caballeria was a Jew by race, and a man who was actually concerned in the murder of the Inquisitor Arbues; but his great wealth enabled him to purchase not only one but two Briefs from Rome, and to secure the further favor of Ferdinand. He was accused and prosecuted in vain by the Holy Office of Aragon. He not only escaped with his life, but he rose to a high position in the State, and eventually mingled his Jewish and heretic blood with that of royalty itself. Various attempts were made by the Commons of Aragon to abate the powers of the Inquisition; and at the Cortes of Monzon, in 1510, so vigorous a remonstrance was addressed to Ferdinand that he was unable to do more than avoid a decision by a postponement on the ground of desiring fuller information; and two years later, at the same place, he was compelled to sanction a declaration or ordinance, by which the authority assumed by the Holy Office, in defiance of the Constitution of Aragon, was specifically declared to be illegal; and the king swore to abolish the privileges and jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Within a few months, however, he caused himself to be absolved from this oath by a Papal Brief; and the Inquisition remained unreformed and triumphant. But the Aragonese had not yet entirely lost their independence, and a popular rising compelled the king not only to renounce the Brief, so lately received, but to solicit from the Pope a Bull (May 12, 1515), exonerating him from so doing, and calling upon all men, lay and ecclesiastical, to maintain the authority of the Cortes. Aragon was satisfied. And the people enjoyed for a season the blessings of comparative immunity from persecution.