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CHAPTER VI SAINTS, HEROES AND MARTYRS THE victims of the Inquisition were recruited from every walk of life and every section of society, from the highest to the lowest. They included priests and nobles, poets and statesmen, nuns and friars, farmers of the revenue, beggars, merchants, craftsmen, pastry-cooks, peddlers, scriveners, attorneys, booksellers, professors, university students, uneducated women, children scarcely out of school, old men with one foot in the grave, knights of the various military orders, aristocrats allied to the noblest families in the land. Each story embodies its own tragedy, set down with incredible callousness by the functionary who reported the trial or the chronicler who recorded it. Some of the cases are of more universal interest than the rest; and a few of them, illustrating in a larger measure the pathetic romance of Marrano history, will be described here at greater length.1 The earliest of the Portuguese autos-da-fè witnessed the martyrdom of a succession of extraordinary popular religious leaders. During the period which preceded the establishment of the Inquisition in that country, a considerable amount of disturbance had been caused on account of a certain Luis Dias, a poor and uneducated New Christian tailor of the sea-port of Setubal, to the south of Lisbon. His mind was filled with confused Jewish ideas which he had heard from his parents. These worked on him to such an extent that he began to con146
