He was a murderer from the beginning,...
John 8:44
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| Martinez was imprisoned by royal order in 1395, and although he was quickly released, he died soon after, leaving his fortune to a hospital he had founded in San María. wikipedia |
Whether he be the Jew-Roaster in Germany, a prophet from the dungheaps of France, or a Spanish archdeacon in clerical weeds, he everywhere exhibits the stigmata of the inspired nihilist:
virtue undefiled by honor,
piety triggered by hate,
and a sense of conviction which equates tolerance with treason
-all fused into holy madness by a passion for violence and murder.
Martinez the Archdeacon had a single mission in life -- to wipe out the Jews.
With a mighty eloquence he preached the gospel of slaughter to excited mobs in the streets and churches of Seville. The Jews, he said, were infidel dogs, and their synagogues were houses of the Devil where three times each day they cursed Christ and all His sheep. It was therefore the sacred duty of Christians to kill the wicked sons of Moses. .... He was accordingly in a position to guarantee absolution from all sin and the eternal bliss of Paradise to Jew-killers.
For years the roads from Seville to the royal court were traveled by couriers bearing petitions from the Jews begging for royal
The Crown, in turn, sent repeated warnings to Martinez to stop agitating the populace to violence and sedition. To the complaints of the Jews Martinez replied with volleys of invective, asserting that if he had his way he would personally kill them all and level their synagogues to the ground.
He also refused to concede that the king had any authority to interfere with the inalienable right of Christians to kill Jews or with the holy mission of the Lord's personal representative on earth-Martinez, that is.
In 1389 Martinez suddenly found himself facing a really formidable threat to his power. He had announced, in a recent sermon, that not even the Pope had the authority to allow Jews to build synagogues and live among Christians.
For fourteen years the ecclesiastical shepherds had been standing silently by while the archdeacon vomited his hate on the Jews. But now he had ventured to question the authority of the Pope; now he was preaching not just mass murder, but heresy.
The archbishop of Seville died within a few months and until his replacement could be sent in, Martinez was first in command.
At almost the same time, King John I fell off his horse in a freak accident and was killed. He left a sickly son of tender years to succeed him and a conflict immediately broke out between opposing factions at the court over who was to run the government until the boy grew up. The result was political chaos, bringing a temporary halt to effective government in Castile.....the fortuitous deaths of both the king and the archbishop suddenly opened the way to the ghetto of Seville.
On March 15, 1391, Martinez celebrated Ash Wednesday with a thunderous sermon in the public square.
The People, assembled in great numbers, howled and applauded. When they were well heated up, their Leader sent them out to scour the streets. Running in packs they began beating up Jews and robbing them. Those who escaped ran to the ghetto and locked themselves in.
The governor and a body of magistrates, hoping to stop the disturbance short of revolution, seized two of the ringleaders and had them publicly flogged.
This only enraged the mob even more and considerable bloodshed and plunder followed before the authorities were able to restore some semblance of order.
Three months later the final storm broke. At the first flush of dawn on June 6, 1391, by an obviously prearranged plan, the People of Seville suddenly burst from their houses, joined ranks all over town and converged on the ghetto.
In their first onslaught they smashed down the gates and stormed over the walls.
All day they
raped,
murdered,
looted and
burned.
Men, women and children were axed, hammered, bludgeoned and chopped to death, while the hot voice of Archdeacon Martinez kept urging his army on to even greater slaughter in the name of the Lord. In one single day four thousand Jews were murdered. More thousands averted death by shouting out their desire for Christian baptism. Others fled into the country to become wanderers in a hostile land. A miserable remnant somehow survived and slowly gathered itself together after the horror had passed.....similar massacres broke out all over Spain.
During the next three months the spirit of Ferdinand Martinez erupted in violence and murder in at least seventy cities.
In the north the bloody tide spilled across the Pyrenees into France; in the east it ran red into the Mediterranean Sea; in the south and west it did not stop until it reached the frontiers of Moorish Granada and Portugal. At Cordova, the birthplace of Moses
A like fate struck Toledo, center of European learning in the West...There the largest Jewish community in Spain was destroyed August 5, on the Fast Day when the Jews were mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylonian armies two thousand years before.
Refugees from the archdeacon's crusade began arriving at the port of Valencia with tales of horror. Within a few days the Jews had locked themselves inside their houses and the city fathers had posted heavy guards to patrol the ghetto day and night. Children, as every child soon discovers, make a game of everything, including persecution. The following Sunday morning a band of forty or fifty Valencian moppets, intoxicated by the assurance of their elders' approval, in the public square for a little sport with Jews. Waving small wooden Crosses and a large blue banner emblazoned with a white Crucifix, they marched on the Jewish quarter, a chorus boy sopranos singing praises to the Savior. Other kids rushed to join the fun and by the time they arrived at the ghetto they made a considerable little army. They milled around outside the entrance, hurling jeers and catcalls at the Jews inside, warning them that Archdeacon Martinez himself was on his way to clean up the city. This was the the Jews' last chance -- they could take their choice between baptism and death.
The Jews quickly into the ghetto, but not before a few of the boy soldiers in the front ranks were pushed inside by their
The town officials, whose frightened efforts to restore order almost got them killed as Jew-loving spoil- sports, scurried off to the palace of the bishop of Valencia. There they begged their royal visitor, Don Martin of Aragon, brother of the king, to save the city from revolution. His Excellency mounted his horse. gathered his retinue about him, and set out for the ghetto. At the sight of the royal colors the besiegers grudgingly laid down their battering rams and opened a path for their duke. The latter called upon the Jews to open the gate so the People could see that their young Christian soldiers were unharmed. In return he promised to station his personal guard inside the ghetto to guarantee its safety.
Paralyzed by fear, the Jews either would not or could not open the barrier, and the royal effort to thwart the People's pleasures was dissipated in a renewed thrust at the gate, which suddenly gave way under the sheer weight of numbers. In this first assault one of the attackers was killed. A terrible silence-the aura of doom-fell over the crowd while the body was reverently passed through the mob and laid at the feet of the duke.
For one brief moment the world seemed to stand still, and the smell of Death hung heavy in the air. Then a roar from ten thousand throats split the skies, heralding the return of mankind to the
The governor of Palma had his horse shot out from under him and was himself wounded while trying to quell the disorders there.
The mob at Lerida stampeded right over the local magistrates and set fire to the town fortress, burning to death all the Jews inside along with the mayor who tried to protect them.
It was in Barcelona, where a Jewish community of ten thousand people disappeared via the twin roads of baptism and murder that the Great Massacre took on the dimensions of a proletarian revolution.
On the Feast Day of Saint Dominic, a crowd of peasants, workers and screaming women, together with a group of sailors returning from the crusade at Valencia, set fire to the ghetto. Through the whole day and all during the night they murdered and plundered. The fleeing Jews took refuge in the great castle fortress in the center of town and the local governor posted a heavy cordon of troops around it to discourage the "little people" from further attacks.
The following morning-Sunday-he threw some forty of the ringleaders in jail and on Monday he sentenced them to hang as an example to the rest. But when the martyrs were brought out for execution their homespun disciples, to the chant of "Long live the People," hurled themselves on the governor and his colleagues, killing one of them and trampling the rest under foot. They broke into the jail and freed all the prisoners. Then they chopped down the city gates while others climbed up to the bell towers of the churches and rang the bells to summon the peasants.
On Tuesday they stormed the city hall and ransacked it, building great bonfires of the public documents and town records. Then they threw themselves at the castle fortress, demanding death or baptism for the Jews inside. The defenders, including the Jews themselves, fought back desperately and the battle raged until the next day before the castle fell. Some of the Jews killed themselves with their own hands; others flung themselves from the walls. The remainder were called upon to accept immediate baptism. those who refused were killed on the spot and their corpses dragged about the city streets; the rest were hustled off to the baptismal font and purified. The Jews who had somehow escaped were rooted out of their hiding places and destroyed without mercy.
By the end of the summer of 1391 many of the Jewish communities of Spain, for centuries the repositories of learning, culture and industry for the whole Peninsula, had entirely disappeared. ....., a young woman convert was heard to say in public that she still felt a yearning for the faith of Moses. The next morning she was found in a ditch at the edge of town with a knife through her heart. The conclusion of local criminologists was that she had done herself in "at the suggestion of the Devil."
The Age of Torquemada by John Longhurst/