On This Day in Jewish History: 6 Tishrei - Pedro De Arbues -1485
On this day in 1485, the inquisitor Pedro de Arbues was attacked in the cathedral of Zaragoza. He was struck down as he knelt at prayer before the altar, and he died of his wounds three days later. He had been appointed to run the Inquisition in Aragon the year before by Torquemada himself, and he understood the risks well enough that he wore chain mail under his tunic and a helmet beneath his hood. It was not enough. The men who planned and paid for the killing came from the wealthiest converso families in the kingdom, families whose grandparents had accepted baptism under duress and whose children were now being hunted by the tribunal as secret Jews.
Their desperation is not hard to understand, and their judgment is not hard to condemn. The Inquisition was widely resented in Aragon, and not only by conversos. Old Christians opposed it as well, seeing it as a Castilian assault on their own laws and liberties, and a contemporary chronicler recorded that some of them took part in the plot. But when the reprisals came, not one of them was tried. The fury fell entirely on the conversos. Men were seized and mutilated, their hands nailed to the cathedral door before they were put to death. Nine were executed, thirteen more burned in effigy, and the purge swept up prominent conversos who had nothing whatever to do with the killing. A crime committed by a handful of desperate men handed the Inquisition everything it needed to destroy an entire class.
The story did not end there. In the document canonizing him in 1867, Pope Pius IX wrote that divine wisdom had arranged for the decree of sanctity to be completed in days when the Jews were helping the enemies of the church with their books and their money. The church has since walked back some of this. It suppressed the cult of Simon of Trent in 1965 and others like it, acknowledging that those were blood libels. But Pedro de Arbues remains a saint to this day, his feast kept every September, and the official martyrology of the church still records that he was massacred by apostate Jews.
