Torquemada had urged Ferdinand and Isabella to rid the coun try of the Moors, and, when war began in 1481, he obtained from the Holy See the same spiritual favours for the Spanish soldiers as had been enjoyed by the Crusaders. The Inquisition some times met with furious opposition from the nobles and corn mon people. At Valentia and Lerida there were serious conflicts.
At Saragossa Peter Arbue, a canon and an ardent inquisitor, was slain in 1485 whilst praying in a church; and the threats against the hated Torquemada made him go in fear of his life, and he never went abroad without an escort of forty familiars of the Holy Office on horseback and two hundred more on foot. In 1487 he went with Ferdinand to Malaga and thence to Valla dolid, where in the October of 1488 he held another general con gregation of the Inquisition and promtilgated new laws based on the experience already gained. He then hurried back to Andalusia where he joined the sovereigns, who were now besieging Granada. Persecution of Jews.—The Moors being vanquished, now came the turn of the Jews. For long before 1490 Torque mada had tried to get the royal consent to a general expulsion; but the sovereigns hesitated, and, as the victims were the back bone of the commerce of the country, proposed a ransom of 300,00o ducats instead. The indignant friar would hear of no compromise: "Judas," he cried, "sold Christ for 3o pence; and your highnesses wish to sell Him again for 300,00o ducats." Un
able to bear up against the Dominican's fiery denunciations, the sovereigns, three months after the fall of Granada, issued a de cree ordering every Jew either to embrace Christianity or to leave the country.
The inquisitor-general issued orders to forbid Christians, under severe penalties, having any communication With the Jews or, after the period of grace, to supply them even with the neces saries of life. The former prohibition made it impossible for the unfortunate people to sell their goods which hence fell to the Inquisition. The numbers of Jewish families driven out of the country by Torquemada is variously stated from Mariana's 1,700,000 to the more probable 800,000 of later historians. The loss to Spain was enormous, and from this act of the Dominican the commercial decay of Spain dates.
Torquemada at length took up his residence in Avila, where he had built a convent ; and here he resumed the common life of a friar, leaving his cell in October 1497 to visit, at Salamanca, the dying infante, Don Juan, and to comfort the sovereigns in their parental distress. They often used to visit him at Avila, where in 1498, still in office as inquisitor-general, he held his last gen eral assembly to complete his life's work. Torquemada died on Sept. 16, 1498.