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As a more conclusive proof of his unlimited sway than any other of his acts had been, he had actually unseated and banished the inquisitor-general, Don Pietro Porto Carrero, and supplanted him in that dread office, before which even anointed sovereigns trembled, by one of his own creatures.
The exigencies of persecution making a domestic staff desirable, Charles the Fifth, in the year 1522, applied to his ancient tutor, whom he had placed on the papal throne. Charles had, however, already, in the previous year appointed Francis Van der Hulst to be inquisitor-general for the Netherlands.
Riccardi was at first desirous to examine the MS. again, but, after inspecting only the beginning and the end of it, he gave Galileo leave to print it wherever he chose, providing it bore the license of the Inquisitor-General of Florence, and one or two other persons whom he named.
The inquisitor-general received full powers to cite, arrest, imprison, torture heretics without observing the ordinary forms of law, and to cause his sentences to be executed without appeal.
These, I was informed, were a judge long since dead, and an inquisitor-general. I overheard them disputing with great eagerness whether the one had hanged or the other burned the most.
Diego Torres Vargas, the canon of the San Juan Cathedral, says in his memoirs: "Manso was made inquisitor, and he, being the first, may be said to have been the Inquisitor-General of the Indies; ... the delinquents were brought from all parts to be burned and punished here ... The Inquisition building exists till this day , and until the coming of the Hollanders in 1625 many sambenitos could be seen in the cathedral hung up behind the choir."
Judge Pardee, a bibulous and oracular limb of the law, had been chosen inquisitor-general, with powers to call for all the news that was stowed away in that secretive "knowledge-box" on the shoulders of the Engineer. Gate City had resolved and "'lowed" that a man reputed to know so much should be held up and compelled to part with at least a little.
The president of the council of Italy, after Granvelle's death, was Quiroga, cardinal of Toledo, and inquisitor-general. Enormously long letters, in the King's: name, were prepared chiefly by the two secretaries, Idiaquez and Moura.
Nor did it confine itself to religious affairs; it engaged in the suppression of political discontent. Nicolas Eymeric, who was inquisitor-general of the kingdom of Aragon for nearly fifty years, and who died in 1399, has left a frightful statement of its conduct and appalling cruelties in his "Directorium Inquisitorum."
On July 14 Ortiz de Funes announced his client's intention of appealing to the Inquisitor-General against the decision forcing him to select patronos from a list of persons unknown to him. Neither Luis de Leon nor Ortiz de Funes seemed to have guessed that the Valladolid judges were acting on instructions from the Supreme Inquisition at Madrid.
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