Events on February 8 in history

Luis de Carabajal the younger is tortured by the Inquisition in Mexico City.

Luis de Carvajal (sometimes Luis de Carabajal y de la Cueva) (c. 1537–13 February 1591) was governor of the Spanish province of Nuevo León in present-day Mexico, slave trader, and the first Spanish subject known to have entered Texas from Mexico across the lower Rio Grande.He was a Portuguese-born, Spanish Crown officer, who in 1579 was awarded a large swath of territory in New Spain, known as Nuevo Reino de León. He was born in Mogadouro, Portugal, around 1537, but was raised in the Kingdom of León, Spain at the home of the Count of Benavente, a contemporary and friend of Philip II, who named Carvajal Governor of Nuevo Reino de León and granted him many privileges on the basis of previous services to the Spanish Crown.The territory granted to Carvajal included some portions in the south that had been settled by other Spaniards who refused to accept the terms of the grant and sued Carvajal before the highest court in New Spain. The suits were decided in favor of Carvajal, but Álvaro Manrique de Zúñiga, marqués de Villamanrique, viceroy of New Spain, ordered the arrest of Carvajal in 1588. Carvajal was accused of enslaving large numbers of Indians, a major grievance of the indigenous population fueling the Chichimeca War. Carvajal was also accused of several other offenses by the Inquisition in Mexico City, but only the charge of concealing that his relatives secretly practiced Judaism was upheld. Sentenced to exile, he was sent back to the court's jail, where he died a year later.