Word: alvero
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Friar Thomas and his boyhood friend Don Alvero de Rafel ride from Segovia to Seville at the summons of Ferdinand and Isabella. Each man is consulted about Columbus' projected expedition west to the Indies. Don Alvero, a knight who has fought the Moors, assures the Queen that the earth is indeed round like a ball. The King, however, turns down Columbus on the grounds that 1) the earth is flat, and 2) Columbus is a Jew. Actually, Columbus was not Jewish, but for some odd reason Fast does not bother to enlighten the King or the reader...
Friend Betrayed. The relations between Thomas and Alvero are poisoned, for the King appoints Thomas the Grand Inquisitor of all Spain. Absolute power corrupts him absolutely. He has caused heretics to be burned before; now he accepts the King's commission as a mandate for an anti-Semitic holocaust. Thomas' hatred is not for Jews (who, he thinks, are damned anyway) but for the marrano, the converted Jew who might secretly practice Jewish rites. Fatally, Don Alvero is such a one, or could be mistaken for one by malice and fanaticism. And so, Torquemada puts his friend...
...absolutism who think that their political faith gives them power over the minds and bodies of other men. Koestler brought a better mind to the subject; he began by renouncing the inquisitor within himself. Fast's book is no more than a tua culpa. In the person of Alvero, he seems to be trying to recover in the 15th century the innocence he lost in the 20th...