It would of course be impossible to compile statistics of the torture-chamber, or to form a reasonably accurate estimate of the number of cases in which it was employed during the career of the Inquisition. Some fragmentary data, however, can be had, as in the record of the Toledo tribunal between 1575 and 1610. During this period it tried four hundred and eleven persons for heretical offences admitting of the use of torture, and in these it was used once on one hundred and nine, and twice on eight, besides two cases in which it had to be stopped on account of the fainting of the patient, and seven in which confession was obtained before it commenced. There were also five cases in which the accused was placed in _conspectu tormentorum_.[94] In all, we may say that here its agency was invoked in about thirty-two per cent. of heretical prosecutions. This is probably less than the average. In a number of cases tried by the tribunal of Lima between 1635 and 1639, nearly all the accused appear to have been tortured, while the report of the tribunal of Valladolid for 1624 shows that of eleven cases of Judaism and one of Protestantism, eleven were tortured and, in 1655, every case of Judaism, nine in number, was subjected to torture.[95]
After all, numbers, however they may impress the imagination, are not supremely important. They are simply a measure of the greater or less activity of the tribunals and not of the principles involved. Whenever there was a doubt to solve, whether as to the sufficiency of the evidence, the intention of the accused, the completeness with which he had denounced his associates, or other inscrutable matter, recourse to torture was a thing of course. In not a few cases, indeed, there seems to have been an almost infantile confidence in its power as a universal solvent. About 1710, Fernando Castellon, on trial at Valencia for Judaism, claimed not to be baptized and was promptly tortured to find out, but without success.[96] In 1579 the Toledo tribunal had to deal with Anton Moreno, an aged peasant, accused of entertaining views too liberal as to salvation; torture seemed the only means of definition and, between the turns of the garrote, he was made to express his opinions as to the saving effects of death-bed repentance and the viaticum on a sinner who had been duly baptized with the water of the Holy Ghost. There was ghastly ludicrousness in the attempt, under such persuasion, to ascertain the beliefs of an untutored old man, on these subtle questions of scholastic theology, ending with the result that he was adjudged to be worthy only of abjuration _de levi_, with a reprimand and hearing of a mass in the audience-chamber.[97]