History of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella

The title page calls the author parish priest of Los Palacios and chaplain to Diego de Deza, archbishop of Seville. The editor’s prologue reports, on the word of the seventeenth-century scholar Rodrigo Caro, who saw the parish registers, that Bernáldez was priest of Los Palacios from 1488 to 1513, and says that all the manuscripts go back to a single copy made by Caro. The dates given above for the writing are an inference from those years and from the chapter on the Inquisition, which counts its work down to 1488.

He writes of things done at Seville in his own time, and he says that converts who left the city during the plague of 1481 came to Los Palacios among other places. His figures for the tribunal are round ones, and he does not say where he had them: more than 700 burned and more than 5,000 reconciled at Seville in eight years; more than 15,000 dead of plague in the city in 1481. For the number of Jews he names his informants: a letter of one rabbi to another, and a rabbi who came back after the expulsion and whom he himself baptised. He is no neutral witness. He calls the tribunal holy and the heresy wicked, and ends his chapter on it with the words that the fire is lit and will burn until all who judaized are dead. His pity for the exiles on the road in 1492 stands beside his statement that they set out trusting in the vain hopes of their blindness.

The chapters used are 8 and 9, on the descent and marriage of the king and queen (vol. 1, pp. 29–31); 43 and 44, on the bull and the tribunal of Seville (pp. 122–134); 102, on the surrender of Granada (pp. 300–304); 110 to 112, on the edict and the departure of the Jews (pp. 337–343); and 201, on the death of Isabella I of Castile (vol. 2, pp. 266–267). Some of his dates for the royal family differ from one another, and only those that the wiki needs are repeated. See the Spanish Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews.