Historical context
There was much going on in Spain at this period to make a
serious minded youth thoughtful about questions of religion.
Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic were on the throne, determined
to secure political unity in their new nation by compelling
religious uniformity; and a spirit of the most intolerant
orthodoxy controlled the government. In 1492, for refusing
to deny the faith of their fathers and profess Christianity,
800,000 Jews had been banished from the kingdom. In the same
year the Moors had been overthrown in Granada, and although
for a few years they were granted toleration, they were soon
compelled to choose between abandoning their Mohammedanism
and being driven from Spain. In both cases it was the dogma
of the Trinity that proved the insurmountable obstacle for
races which held as the first article of their faith the undivided
unity of God. Within the generation including Servetus’s
boyhood, some 20,000 victims, Jewish or Mohammedan, were thus
burned at the stake. Despite the resistance of the liberty
loving Aragonians, the Inquisition was set up among them to
root out heresy; and these things must all have made a deep
impression upon the mind of the young Servetus, and may well
have laid the foundation for the main passion of his life.
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