page_title: Diego Rodríguez de Lucero
section_title: Inquisitor
hierarchical_section_title: Diego Rodríguez de Lucero / Inquisitor
caption_attribution_description: Español: Heretiques devant le tribunal de l'Inquisition. Seville. 1481 (Herejes en el tribunal de la Inquisición. Sevilla. 1481). Grabado en agua fuerte.
context_page_description: Diego Rodríguez de Lucero was a priest and inquisitor of the Kingdom of Castile based in Córdoba between 1499 and 1507.
  His harsh and unjust persecutions created a reign of terror, and eventually he was removed from office.
context_section_description: The Spanish Inquisition was created in 1478 to persecute Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants, accused of secretly retaining their ancestral faith.
  The Jews were expelled from Aragon and Castile in 1492, and the last secret synagogues were found and destroyed around 1500.
  In 1499 there were rumors among the conversos and crypto-Jewish people of Córdoba that the end of the world would come in 1500.
  When the Inquisition heard of this, it opened an investigation.
  On 7 September 1499 the Grand Inquisitor, Diego Deza, appointed Diego Rodríguez de Lucero inquisitor of Córdoba.
  As described in the Catalog of the Bishop of Cordoba, "After the death of the first inquisitors, Diego Rodríguez Lucero, schoolmaster, came from Almería in the year 1500".
  As inquisitor of the Córdoba tribunal he gave his address as Encarnación Street, very close to the Mosque–Cathedral.
  He launched a fierce persecution of Jews who had converted to Christianity, and created a reign of terror in Andalusia.
  His hardness and excesses in the trials became proverbial.
  The chronicler Peter Martyr d'Anghiera called him "the Dark One".
  Others at the time said he was an "exceptional monster, inspired by Lucifer."
  Gómez Bravo wrote of him:
  he had a pungent and hard genius; and to accredit himself as a jealous minister in the faith, and to accumulate merit for promotion to greater dignities, he began to treat inmates of prison with exquisite rigor so that they could denounce others as accomplices, which resulted in so many numbers of indicted persons, both converts and from other pure families, the city was scandalized and came to tumult.
  At this time the tribunal had jurisdiction throughout the new Archdiocese of Granada.
  Rodríguez de Lucero undertook many investigations in the city of Granada.
  Lucero waited for Queen Isabel to die on 26 November 1504 before involving the archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera and his family in a case of alleged heresy.
  Several hundred innocent people, many of them supporters of Queen Isabel, were executed at the stake.
  The Inquisitor General, supported by the king, suppressed all protest.
  Rodríguez de Lucero celebrated an auto-da-fé in Córdoba in December 1504 that caused widespread fear.
  His testimony of the massacre said, "when he burned a hundred and seven men they were shouting to God and the Virgin to forgive them and saying that they never committed the sin of heresy, and called on the scribes to testify that they died as Christian Catholics and in the faith of Jesus Christ."
caption: Heretics before the 1481 tribunal in Seville (drawn in 1870)
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