Yepes chronicles four miracles performed by the child after his death, beginning with his mother’s obtaining sight. All these, with other very interesting and purely romantic details, are to be found in that piously fraudulent work--the “Life of the Holy Child,” by Martinez Moreno. CHAPTER XXV THE EDICT OF BANISHMENT It was, as we have already suggested, the very opportuneness with which the trial and sentence of those concerned in the affair of La Guardia came to afford Torquemada an additional argument to plead with the Sovereigns his case against the Jews, which has led so many historians--prior to M. Fidel Fita’s discovery--to reject the story as an invention. Another reason to discredit it lay in the circumstance that it was circulated in Spain together with a number of other stories that were obviously false and obviously invented expressly for the purpose of defaming the Jews and exciting popular indignation against them. Meanwhile Ferdinand and Isabella pressed triumphantly forward on their conquering progress through Andalusia. Lucena, Coin, Ronda, and scores of other Moorish strongholds in the southern hills had fallen before the irresistible arms of the Christians; and the Sovereigns, aided by Jewish gold--not merely the gold extorted by confiscations, but moneys voluntarily contributed by their Hebrew subjects--pushed on to the reduction of Malaga, as the prelude to the leaguer of Granada itself, the last bulwark of Islam in Spain. This fell on January 2, 1492, and with it fell the Moslem dominion, which had endured in the peninsula, with varying fortunes, for nearly 800 years. It might well have seemed to the Catholic Sovereigns that the conquest of Spain and the victory there of Christianity were at last accomplished, had not Torquemada been at their elbow to point out that the triumph of the Cross would never be complete in that land as long as the Jews continued to be numbered among its inhabitants. He protested that the evils resulting from intercourse between Christian and Jew were notorious and unconquerable. He declared that in spite of the Inquisition, and in spite of all other measures that had been taken to keep Christian and Jew apart, the evil persisted and was as rampant as ever. He urged that the Jews continued unabatedly to pervert the Christians, and that they must so continue as long as they were tolerated to remain in the peninsula. Particularly was this notorious in the case of the Marranos or New-Christians, to whom the Israelites gave no peace until--by indoctrination or by the scorn and abuse they heaped upon them--they had seduced them back into error. And in proof of what he urged he was able to point to the affair of La Guardia, to the outrage to the crucifix at Casar de Palomero, and to other matters of a kindred nature that had lately been brought to light.