United States or Vatican City ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In Seville, a plot of ground, called the Quemadero, or place of burning a new Aceldama was set apart for executions; and here in one year 280 heretics were committed to the flames, while 79 were condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and 17,000 to lighter punishments of various kinds. In Andalusia alone 5,000 houses were at once abandoned by their inhabitants.
According to the tale of Henriques, confirmed by what they had learned otherwise, the great procession of the Act of Faith would turn on to the quay at about eight o'clock, and pass along it for a hundred yards or so only, before it wound away down a street leading to the plaza where the theatre was prepared, the sermon would be preached, the Mass celebrated, and the "relaxed" placed in cages to be carried to the Quemadero.
"On Sunday morning," he began in a hollow whisper, "the procession will be formed, and wind through the streets of the city to the theatre, where the sermon will be preached before those who are relaxed proceed to the Quemadero.
In the Quemadero at Seville, as in our own Smithfield, the prisoners of the Church were fastened to stakes, and the sticks with which they were consumed were tied into fagots, instead of being plaited into basket-work. So slight a difference does not materially affect the likeness. The tribal chieftainship and the religious organization of the Druids were both of them inherited from antiquity.
They were all tied to stakes on the quemadero, a piece of pavement, without the walls of the city, devoted to the single use of burning human victims.
For one thing I did not know where the place of the quemadero was; and I do not yet know where those Protestant churches are. If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them but, as it was, we gave our second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in the series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of the cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir.
For on the next day, the Sunday, there was to be an "Act of Faith," an auto-da-fe in Seville, when wicked heretics, such as Jews, Moors, and persons who had spoken blasphemy, were to suffer for their crimes some by fire on the Quemadero, or place of burning, outside the city; some by making public confession of their grievous sin before they were carried off to perpetual and solitary imprisonment; some by being garotted before their bodies were given to the flames, and so forth.
It matters little or nothing whether the Inquisition, with its secret spies, its closed doors, its mockery of justice, and its terrible background of smouldering Quemadero, was the instrument of the Church or of the King for the moment.
"That is just what many heretics have urged. They have died gloriously for what they hold to be the truth, why should not you? Listen," she went on more sternly. "Will you take your chance of burning on the Quemadero, which you will not do unless you betray us, or will you certainly burn more privately, but better, in a baker's oven, and within half an hour? Ah! I thought you would not hesitate.
Eventually, of course, the pet dove changes into a lovely girl again, when the King finds and draws out the pins which the negress has stuck into her head, and the usurper is "burnt" as punishment an ending which savours of the Quemadero. The making of folklore is not, however, extinct in Spain, a country where poetry seems to be an inherent faculty.
Word Of The Day