Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A HistorySabatini, Rafael
History
Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History
Sabatini, Rafael
Inquisition -- Spain; Torquemada, Tomás, de, 1420-1498
Juan Franco lured the boy away with the offer of sweetmeats. He
regained his cart with his victim, concealed the latter therein,
and so returned to La Guardia. There he kept the child closely and
safely until Passion Week of the following year, or, rather, until the
season of the Passover, when the eleven Jews--six of whom had received
Christian baptism--assembled in La Guardia. They took the child by
night to a cave in the hills above the river, and there they compelled
him to play the protagonist part in a detailed parody of the Passion,
scourging him, crowning him with thorns, and finally nailing him to a
cross.
On the subject of the scourging, Moreno tells us that the Jews
carefully counted the number of lashes, aiming in this, as in all other
details, at the greatest historical fidelity. But when the child had
borne without murmuring upwards of five thousand strokes, he suddenly
began to cry. One of the Jews--finding, we are to suppose, that this
weeping required explanation--asked him: “Boy, why are you crying?”
To this the boy replied that he was crying because he had received five
lashes more than his Divine Master.
“So that,” says this doctor of divinity quite soberly, “if the lashes
received by Christ numbered 5,495, as computed by Lodulfo Cartujano in
his ‘In Vita Christi,’ those received by the Holy Child Christoval were
5,500.”[162]
He mentions here the child’s name as “Christoval,” to which he informs
us that it was changed from “Juan,” to the end that the former might
more aptly express the manner of his death. There is no doubt that some
such consideration weighed when the child was given that suggestive
name; but the real reason for it was that no name was known (for the
identity of the boy did not transpire), and it was necessary to supply
him with one by which he might be worshipped.
When he was crucified, his side was opened by one of the Jews, who
began to rummage[163] for the child’s heart. He failed to find it, and
he was suddenly checked by the child’s question--“What do you seek,
Jew? If you seek my heart, you are in error to seek it on that side;
seek on the other, and you will find it.”
In the very moment of his death, Moreno tells us, the Santo Niño
performed his first miracle. His mother, who had been blind from birth,
received the gift of sight in the instant that her child expired.[164]
This interpolation appears to be entirely Moreno’s own, and it is one
of the justifications of our assumption that the work is to be placed
in the category of pious frauds. But he is, of course, mistaken, by
his own narrative, in announcing this as the first of the child’s
miracles. He overlooks the miracle entailed in the capacity to count
displayed by a boy of four years of age, and the further miracle of the
speech addressed by the crucified infant to the Jew who had opened his
side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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