Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/68

 42 THE STRUGGLE WITH THE PORTUGUESE nese, " cast souls into hell through fear." In 1560 the Inquisition was established in India under the Domin- ican Order. Its atrocities reached Europe in a perhaps exaggerated form. But a Portuguese writer states that seventy-one autos da fe, or general burnings, were held in 173 years, and that at " a few " of them 4046 per- sons were sentenced to various punishments, 121 being condemned to the flames. These savageries were perpetrated chiefly, but not altogether, on the unhappy Nestorian or " St. Thomas " Christians, who had dwelt quietly in India for centuries before the advent of the Portuguese. Wherever the Portuguese established their power, from Ceylon to the distant Spice Islands, they tried to make conversions. Every convert was a possible apostate, and to apostasy the Inquisition showed no mercy. The tolerant spirit which I have noticed in some of the early Portuguese treaties with native princes seemed little short of a denial of Christ to the zealot who in 1580 united the crowns of Portugal and Spain. Philip II would have no paltering with either the Indian infidels or the ortho- dox Nestorians. After drawing the rope tighter round the neck of Indian heresy in 1594, he delivered his stroke at the non-Christians in 1598. He learned that previous viceroys had granted some tolerant provisions in regard to the temples and worship of the native faiths. " I deem it good," wrote his Majesty, " that they be revised by the Inquisitors and theologians who reside in those parts.' ' In the following year, 1599, he struck a more fatal