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
In these last particulars his confession is of an extreme frankness,
and we can only suppose that he is merely repeating what the torture
had already extracted from him. Completely to elucidate the matter as
it concerns Benito Garcia, we should require to be in possession of the
full records of his own trial (which have not yet been discovered),
whereas at present we have to depend upon odd documents from that
_dossier_ which are introduced in Yucé Franco’s as relating to the
latter.
Questioned more closely concerning these Jews he has mentioned--Mosé
and Yucé Franco--Benito states that they lived with their father, Ça
Franco, at Tenbleque, that he was in the habit of visiting them upon
matters of business, and that he had frequently eaten meat at their
house on Fridays and Saturdays and other forbidden days, and had often
given them money to purchase oil for the synagogue lamps.
We know that, as a consequence of these confessions, Ça Franco, an old
man of eighty years of age, and his son Yucé, a lad of twenty who was
a cobbler by trade, were arrested on July 1, 1489, for proselytizing
practices--_i.e._ for having induced Benito Garcia to abandon the
Christian faith to which he had been converted.
Ça’s other son, Mosé, was either dead at the time or else he died very
shortly after arrest and before being brought to trial.
Juan de Ocaña, too, was arrested upon the same grounds.
They were taken to Segovia, and thrown into the prison of the Holy
Office in that city. In this prison Yucé Franco fell so seriously ill
that he believed himself at the point of death.
A physician named Antonio de Avila, who spoke either Hebrew or the
jargon of Hebrew and Romance that was current among the Jews of the
Peninsula, went to attend to the sick youth. Yucé implored this doctor
to beseech the inquisitors to send a Jew to pray with him and to
prepare him for death--“_que le dixiese las cosas que disen los Judios
quando se quieren morir_.”
The physician, who, like all the family of the Inquisition, was himself
a spy, duly conveyed the request to the inquisitors. They seized
the chance to put into practice one of the instructions advanced by
Eymeric. They sent a Dominican, one Frey Alonso Enriquez, disguised as
a Jew, to minister to the supposed moribund. The friar had a fluent
command of the language spoken by the Jews of Spain. He introduced
himself to the lad as a Rabbi named Abraham, and completely imposed
upon him and won his confidence.
He pressed Yucé to confide in him, and in his manner of doing so he
proceeded along the crafty lines advocated by the “Directorium.”
Eymeric, as will be remembered, enjoins that when a prisoner is
examined, the precise accusation against him should not be disclosed;
rather he should be questioned as to why he conceives that he has been
arrested and by whom he supposes himself to have been accused, with the
object of perhaps discovering further and hitherto unsuspected matters
against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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