46 CHAPTER 2 THE HISPANIC BACKGROUND
help to explain why the Sovereigns, who had sur-
rounded themselves with Jewish and converso
advisers, and one of whom (Ferdinand) had Jew-
ish blood in his veins, established the Inquisition
and expelled the Jews from their kingdom. When
the crown had tamed the nobility and the towns,
when it had acquired large new sources of rev-
enue, its dependence on the Jews and conversos
weakened. The sacrifi ce of the Jews and conversos
sealed the alliance among the absolute monarchy,
the church, and the nobility.
The conversos fi rst felt the blows of religious
persecution with the establishment of the Inqui-
sition in Castile in 1478. The task of this tribunal
was to detect, try, and punish heresy, and its special
target was the conversos, many of whom were sus-
pected of secretly adhering to Judaism. As a result
of the Inquisition’s activities, some two thousand
conversos were burned at the stake; a hundred and
twenty thousand fl ed abroad. As certain Castilian
towns pointed out in memorials that protested the
establishment of the Inquisition, the purge had a
disastrous effect on the economy by causing this
great fl ight of the conversos and their capital.
The Jews had a breathing space of twelve years
during the costly War of Granada, for they were
among the largest contributors to the royal fi -
nances. The surrender of Granada, however, sealed
their fate. The conquest of a rich territory and an
industrious Islamic population, which ended the
drain of the war, meant that the Jews were no
longer fi nancially indispensable. After some hesita-
tion, the Sovereigns yielded to anti-Semitic pressure
and, on March 30, 1492, signed the edict giving
the Jews the choice of conversion or expulsion.
The destruction or fl ight of many conversos
and the expulsion of the Jews certainly contributed
to the dreary picture presented by the kingdom’s
economy at the close of the sixteenth century. The
purge of the conversos eliminated from Castilian life
its most vital merchant and artisan elements, the
groups that in England and Holland were preparing
the ground for the Industrial Revolution. The fl ight
of converso artisans dealt local industry a heavy
blow and was directly responsible for royal edicts
(1484) that invited foreign artisans to settle in Cas-
tile with an exemption from taxes for ten years.
The anti-Semitic policies of the Sovereigns
also harmed science and thought in general. The
Inquisition helped to blight the spirit of free in-
quiry and discussion in Castile at a time when the
Renaissance was giving an extraordinary impulse
to the play of European intellect in all fi elds. The
Sovereigns, who laid the foundations of imperial
greatness in so short a time, bear much of the re-
sponsibility for its premature decline. But the con-
tradictions in their policies, the incorrect decisions
that nullifi ed much of the sound part of their work,
resulted from more than personal errors of judg-
ment; they refl ected the structural weakness and
backwardness of Castilian society as it emerged
from seven centuries of struggle against the Mus-
lim occupation.Even as they continued secretly to observe their
religious and cultural traditions, Jews publicly
converted to Christianity to avoid the torture and
burning depicted in this 1475 woodcut, which
shows the Spanish Inquisition at work in Granada.
[The Granger Collection, New York]