In confirmation of these assertions I shall quote from Ranke, a German Protestant historian, who cannot be suspected of partiality to the Catholic Church. “In the first place,” says this author, “the Inquisitors were royal officers. The Kings had the right of appointing and dismissing them.... The courts of the Inquisition were subject, like other magistracies, to royal visitors. ‘Do you not know,’ said the King (to Ximenes), ‘that if this tribunal possesses jurisdiction, it is from the King it derives it?’ “In the second place, all the profit of the confiscations by this court accrued to the King. These were carried out in a very unsparing manner. Though the _fueros_ (privileges) of Aragon forbade the King to confiscate the property of his convicted subjects, he deemed himself exalted above the law in matters pertaining to this court.... The proceeds of these confiscations formed a sort of regular income for the royal exchequer. It was even believed, and asserted from the beginning, that the Kings had been moved to establish and countenance this tribunal more by their hankering after the wealth it confiscated than by motives of piety. “In the third place, it was the Inquisition, and the Inquisition alone, that completely shut out all extraneous interference with the state. The sovereign had now at his disposal a tribunal from which no grandee, no Archbishop, could withdraw himself. As Charles knew no other means of bringing certain punishment on the Bishops who had taken part in the insurrection of the _Communidades_ (or communes who were struggling for their rights and liberties), he chose to have them judged by the Inquisition.... “It was in spirit and tendency a political institution. _The Pope had an interest in thwarting it, and he did so_; but the King had an interest in constantly upholding it.”(321) That the Inquisition acted independently of the Holy See, and that even the Catholic hierarchy fell under the ban of this royal tribunal, is also apparent from the following fact: After the convening of the Council of Trent, Bartholomew Caranza, Archbishop of Toledo, was arrested by the Inquisition on a charge of heresy, and his release from prison could not be obtained either by the interposition of Pius IV. or the remonstrance of the Council. It is true that Sixtus IV., yielding to the importunities of Queen Isabella, consented to its establishment, being advised that it was necessary for the preservation of order in the kingdom; but in 1481, the year following its introduction, when the Jews complained to him of its severity, the same Pontiff issued a Bull against the Inquisitors, as Prescott informs us, in which “he rebuked their intemperate zeal and even threatened them with deprivation.” He wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella that “mercy towards the guilty was more pleasing to God than the severity which they were using.”