The Holy Office has done its work in Spain. A rapacious government, an enslaved people, a hollow religion, a corrupt Church, a century of blood, three centuries of shame, all these things followed in its wake. And the country of Viriatus and Seneca, of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, where Ruy Diaz fought, and Alfonso studied, and where two warrior kings in two successive centuries defied Rome temporal and Rome spiritual, and all the crusaders of Europe--Spain, hardly conquered by Scipio or by Cæsar, was enslaved by the dead hand of Dominic. CHAPTER VI THEIR CATHOLIC MAJESTIES THE BANISHMENT OF THE JEWS--INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS--THE SPANIARDS IN ITALY--THE VICTORIES OF GONSALVO--THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA The fall of Granada left the Catholic sovereigns free to turn their attention more completely to the domestic affairs of the kingdom; and it seems moreover to have increased the bigotry both of the Church and of the Court, and to have added new zeal to the fury of the Inquisition. The conquest of the Moorish kingdom was said by pious ecclesiastics to be a special sign or manifestation of the approval by Heaven of the recent institution of the Holy Office. The knights and nobles, proud of their military successes, may have attributed the victory to causes more flattering to their valor, their skill, and their perseverance. The common people, as yet not demoralized, but gorged with plunder, and invited to occupy without purchase the fairest province in the Peninsula, were little disposed to quarrel with the policy of Ferdinand; and far from feeling any pity for the sufferings of the vanquished Moors, they sighed for new infidels to pillage. And new infidels were promptly found. The Inquisition so far had troubled itself but little with Christian heretics. The early Spanish Protestantism of the thirteenth century had died away. The later Spanish Protestantism of the sixteenth century had not yet come into existence. Few men had done more than Averroes of Cordova and Ramon Lull of Palma to awaken religious thought in Medieval Europe; yet speculative theology has never been popular among the Spanish people. It was against the Jews, renegade or relapsed, even more than the avowedly unconverted, that the Holy Office directed all its exertions until the end of the fifteenth century. By April, 1492, although a great number of the unfortunate Hebrews had already found their way to the Quemadero, there was still a very large Jewish population in Spain, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the most orderly, but, unhappily for themselves, the most wealthy of all the inhabitants of the Peninsula.