These quarrels and the exercise of its widely extended temporal jurisdiction by no means distracted wholly the tribunal from its legitimate functions of preserving the purity of the faith. In 1640 it held a notable auto de fe in which one case is worth alluding to as an illustration of inquisitorial dealings with the insane. Carlo Tabaloro of Calabria was an Augustinian lay-brother, who had conceived the idea that he was the Son of God and the Messiah, Christ having been merely the Redeemer. He had written a gospel about himself and framed a series of novel religious observances. Arrested by the Palermo tribunal, in 1635, he had imagined it to be for the purpose of enabling him to convert the inquisitors and through them the people. For five years the theologians labored to disabuse him, but to no purpose; he was condemned as an obstinate and pertinacious heretic and was led forth in the auto of 1640 to be burnt alive. On his way to the stake he still expected that torrents of rain would extinguish the fires, but finding himself disappointed and shrinking from the awful death, at the last moment he professed conversion and was mercifully strangled before the pile was lighted.[78] At another auto, June 2, 1647, there were thirty-four penitents and six months later another, January 12, 1648, with thirty-seven, followed, December 13th of the same year, by one with forty-three. January 22, 1651, there was another with thirty-nine, honored moreover with the presence of Don John of Austria, fresh from the triumph of suppressing the Neapolitan revolt of Masaniello. In fact, in a letter of April 26, 1652, the inquisitors boasted that they had punished two hundred and seven culprits in public autos, besides nearly as many who had been despatched privately in the audience chamber. This would show an average of about eighty cases a year, greatly more than at this time was customary in Spain. The offences were mostly blasphemy, bigamy and sorcery, with an occasional Protestant or Alumbrado, the Judaizers by this time having almost disappeared.[79] The position of inquisitor was not wholly without danger, for Juan López de Cisneros died of a wound in the forehead inflicted by Fray Diego la Mattina, a prisoner whom he was visiting in his cell and who was burnt alive in the auto of March 17, 1658.[80] The activity of the tribunal must at times have brought in considerable profits for, in 1640, we happen to learn that it was contributing yearly twenty-four thousand reales in silver to the Suprema and not long afterwards it was called upon to send five hundred ducats, _plata doble_, to that of Majorca, which had been impoverished by a pestilence. Still these gains were fluctuating and the demands on the tribunal seem to have brought it into financial straits, from which the Suprema sought to relieve it by an appeal, August 6, 1652, to Philip IV, to grant it benefices to the amount of twenty-five hundred ducats a year.[81]