When four or five hundred years later it became a
political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their Jewish and
Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses,
Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause. When
presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office began, some five hundred
heretics were burned alive at Seville before the year was out; many
others, who were dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy in
effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the region round
about. Before he was in Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and
there he drew up the rules that governed the procedure of the
Inquisition throughout Spain. A magnificent _quemadero,_ or crematory,
second only to that of Madrid, was built: a square stone platform where
almost every day the smoke of human sacrifice ascended. This crematory
for the living was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now a part of the
city park system which we left on the right that first evening when we
drove to the Delicias. I do not know why I should now regret not having
visited the place of this dreadful altar and offered my unavailing pity
there to the memory of those scores of thousands of hapless martyrs who
suffered there to no end, not even to the end of confirming Spain in the
faith one and indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations
of torment, two Protestant churches in Seville.
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