In the same year, 2000 were burned and 17,000 condemned to public penitence, while even a larger number were burned in effigy, in other parts of the kingdom.
While estimating the importance of these punishments we must remember that they implied confiscation of property.

Thus whole families were orphaned and consigned to penury.

Penitence in public carried with it social infamy, loss of civil rights and honors, intolerable conditions of ecclesiastical surveillance, and heavy pecuniary fines.

Penitents who had been reconciled, returned to society in a far more degraded condition than convicts released on ticket of leave.

The stigma attached in perpetuity to the posterity of the condemned, whose names were conspicuously emblazoned upon church-walls as foemen to Christ and to the State.
It is not strange that the New Christians, wealthy as they were and allied with some of the best blood in Spain, should have sought to avert the storm descending on them by appeals to Rome.