Seville

On 2 January 1481 the Dominicans Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín, writing from the monastery of San Pablo at Seville, said that they had come to the city to exercise the office of inquisition and had begun. Their mandate, addressed to the marquis of Cádiz and other lords, ordered them to arrest those who had left the city for their lands in the past month, to send them back as prisoners and to sequester their goods (Sixtus IV, Exigit sincerae devotionis, inquisitors’ mandate of 2 January 1481 (Fita, pp. 447–458)).

The chronicler Andrés Bernáldez writes that the inquisitors at first held their prisoners at San Pablo, then asked for the castle of Triana and set up their court there. At the first burning six men and women died at Tablada, where the inquisitors had a burning place built. In the same year, he says, more than 15,000 people died of plague in the city, and the Guadalquivir flooded. He puts the number burned at Seville from 1481 to 1488 at more than 700 (Bernáldez, History of the Catholic Monarchs, ch. 44 (vol. 1, pp. 129–134)).

Sixtus IV wrote in January 1482 that many had fled in fear of the inquisitors of Seville and that many of them had appealed to Rome (Sixtus IV, Letters of 1482, brief of 29 January 1482 (Fita, pp. 459–461)). On 29 November 1484 inquisitors from Seville, Córdoba, Ciudad Real and Jaén met in the city with Tomás de Torquemada and agreed the rules known as the Instructions of Seville (Instructions of Seville (1484), preamble (fol. 2r–v)). See the Spanish Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews.