Thus two hundred thousand Spaniards, men, women, and children of tender years, rich and poor, men of refinement and of position, ladies reared in luxury, the aged, the sick, the infirm, all were included in one common destruction, and were driven, stripped of everything, from their peaceful homes, to die on their way to some less savage country. For the sentence was carried out with the most relentless ferocity. Every road to the coast, we read, was thronged with the unhappy fugitives, struggling to carry off some shred of their ruined homes. To succor them was death; to pillage them was piety. At every seaport, rapacious shipmasters exacted from the defenseless travelers the greater part of their remaining possessions, as the price of a passage to some neighboring coast; and in many cases the passenger was tossed overboard ere the voyage was completed, and his goods confiscated to the crew. A rumor having got abroad that the fugitives were in the habit of swallowing jewels and gold pieces in order to evade the royal decree, thousands of unhappy beings were ripped up by the greedy knife of the enemy, on land or sea, on the chance of discovering in their mutilated remains some little store of treasure. And thus, north, south, east, and west, the Jews straggled and struggled over Spain; and undeterred by the manifold terrors of the sea, a vast multitude of exiles, whose homes in Spain once lay in sunny Andalusia, sought and found an uncertain abiding place in neighboring Africa. Of all Christian countries, it was in neighboring Portugal that the greatest number of the exiles found refuge and shelter; until, after five brief years of peace and comparative prosperity, the heavy hand of Castilian intolerance once more descended upon them, and they were driven out of the country, at the bidding of Isabella and her too dutiful daughter, the hope of Portugal and of Castile. But to every country in Europe the footsteps of some of the sufferers were directed. Not a few were permitted to abide in Italy and Southern France; some of the most distinguished found a haven in England; many were fortunate enough to reach the Ottoman dominions, where, under the tolerant government of the Turk, they lived and prospered, and where their descendants, at many of the more important seaports of the Levant, are still found to speak the Castilian of their forefathers. That the edict of banishment was meant to be, as it so constantly was, a doom of death, and not merely a removal of heretics, is clear from the action of the Spanish sovereigns, who, at the instigation of Torquemada, procured from the pliant Innocent VIII. a Bull enjoining the authorities of every country in Christian Europe to arrest and send back to Spain all _fugitive_ Jews under penalty of the Greater Excommunication.