Such was the prodigious activity of the Holy Office, and to such an extent did its holocausts promise to continue, that the Governor of Seville ordered the erection on the fields of Tablada of a permanent platform of stone of vast proportions known as the Quemadero, or Burning-place. It was adorned by figures of the four Prophets. At each of its four corners towered one of these colossal statues of plaster, and Llorente tells us that they were not merely for ornament. He says that they were hollow and so contrived that a condemned person might be placed in each and so die by slow fire.[74] This Quemadero remained standing, a monument to religious intolerance and fanatical cruelty, until the soldiers of Napoleon demolished it in the nineteenth century.[75] So ruthless were Morillo and San Martin, and so negligent of equity or even the observance of the ordinary rules of judicial procedure, that in the end we find the Pope himself--in January of 1482--addressing a letter of protest to the Sovereigns. The first edict commanding the nobles to arrest all those who had fled from Seville had had the effect of driving many of these fugitive New-Christians farther afield in their quest for safety. Some had escaped into Portugal, others had crossed the Mediterranean and sought shelter in Morocco, whilst others still had taken their courage in both hands and sought sanctuary in Rome itself, at the very feet of the Pontiff. Other fugitives followed presently, when the tribunal had already inaugurated its terrible work; and these came clamouring their grievances and protesting that in spite of their innocence they dared no longer remain in a State where no New-Christian was safe from the hatred and injustice shown by the inquisitors to men of their race. Therefore they were driven to seek from Christ’s Vicar the protection to which all Christians and true Catholics were entitled at his hands. [Illustration: _Photo by Lacoste._ FERDINAND OF ARAGON AND THE INFANTE DON JUAN. From the Painting in the Prado Gallery attributed to Miguel Zittoz.] They informed the Pontiff of the methods that were being pursued; they set forth how the inquisitors in their eagerness to secure convictions proceeded entirely upon their own initiative and without the concurrence of the assessor and diocesan ordinary, as had been prescribed; how they were departing from all legal form, imprisoning unjustly, torturing cruelly and unduly, and falsely stigmatizing innocent men as formal heretics, thereafter delivering them to the secular arm for punishment, in addition to confiscating their property so that their children were left in want and under the brand of infamy.