Maria delos angeles pérez

To give this New Christian what he was demanding would, wrote the Council, encourage the people of the New Christian Nation to persevere in their false belief. Homem — was a descendant of New Christians. He appeared before the Portuguese Inquisition in charged with spreading the Judaizing heresy at the University of Coimbra, of which he was chancellor and professor of Canon Law, as well as confessor and preacher at the cathedral. According to the charge, Antonio Homem was the leader of a group of Judaizers among the university professors.

He was said to organize services and other ceremonies over which he presided, dressed as a priest in the Temple as described in the Bible. In the event, however, the general council of the Portuguese Inquisition ordered the youths to be examined again. He recognized that the presence of the New Chris- tians would be beneficial for Spain. A more appreciative attitude towards the merchant and commercial class in general would exercise a valuable influence over Hispanic minds, whose hostility to commerce had created grave problems for the economy since Spain had become a world power.

Certainly Cellorigo was not appealing for freedom of religion, but only on behalf of those New Christians whom he was representing. We do not know, however, if those New Christians who had asked Cellorigo to appeal on their behalf were genuine Christians or whether they were secretly Jews.

Were they perhaps pulling the wool over his eyes? The Supreme Inquisition Council had previously discussed the recom- mendation of its Portuguese colleagues that convicted heretics or those strongly suspected of heresy should be expelled. Though it has many bad humours they cannot be all removed because if they are the body will be subject to and brought near to death.

It was better to keep them in Spain. There were now so many Portuguese New Christians living in Madrid that a special delegated office of the Inquisition should be set up in Madrid. At the beginning of the reign of Philip IV March they went to Madrid and offered a loan of , ducats on favourable terms, asking the king in return to forbid the custom of accepting anonymous denunciations of Judaizing against New Christians. This question was uppermost in political discussion.

The Portuguese Inquisition and, perhaps with slightly less vehemence, the Spanish Inquisition, did not trust the New Christians because active nuclei of secret Jews were still being uncovered.

Furthermore, it was well known that the New Christians left Spain and Portugal to go and live as Jews wherever they were tolerated. Thus neither Inquisition was prepared to give up its power to investigate the family history of a New Christian when he solicited a post or honour which required purity of descent. Effectively, the tradition of endogamous marriage, which as has been seen was taken by the rabbis as a proof of authentic Judaism, was seen similarly by the Inquisitors.

The writer went on to say that people arrested for Judaizing were not like the simple Moorish peasants, labourers or at the most craftsmen, whom they had investigated for continuing some Islamic practices earlier in the century and who in the end had been expelled, but monks, friars, lawyers, jurists, doctors and theologians. Expulsion was the only solution, he thought.

Freedom of movement into Spain from Portugal had encouraged a sub- stantial number of businessmen and others to flock to the prosperous cities of Spain. The most important of them were at court, where their services as financiers were becoming indispensable. Olivares and the New Christians Philip IV, barely 16 years of age, had come to the throne in with a favourite adviser already in position. He was now limpio — of pure blood — for how could a noble caballero be otherwise?

His decision would lead to twenty-seven further years of brutal war and to intoler- able costs in maintaining the armies and rebuilding the Spanish fleets. Such an aggressive policy required a vigorous economy, which in its turn demanded the cooperation of the bankers and army contractors, many of whom were New Christians. This, logically, demanded some relaxation in the rigour with which the statutes of purity of descent were applied in granting honours and making appointments, together with some moderation in the severity of the Inquisition.

They insisted that, since they did not Judaize, they had no need of any pardon. It was not merely a question of what was true, but of the impression of the truth that was received. One example of this was the currency question. The Spanish Crown minted huge amounts of copper coinage. The resulting inflation meant that the cost of the silver which Spain needed to meet its overseas obligations rose continually.

It was calculated that 5 million ducats of silver went abroad annually to pay for the armies in Flanders and Italy, together with naval expenses, while 4 million ducats were spent on imports of wheat. There was a steady drain of illegally exported silver.

The issue is not clear-cut. Most descendants of converts no longer Judaized, but they were clearly identifiable as New Christians and, since some of them, even people who appeared to have led exem- plary Christian lives while still in the Iberian Peninsula, did Judaize and indeed lived openly as Jews once they could, how should the State and the Church behave towards people like those who signed the protest?

If they were indeed genuine Christians, it was unjust to behave towards them as if they were not. But who could be sure? Faced with the protest by the New Christians, the royal confessor, Friar Antonio de Sotomayor, wrote to the king on 18 October , recommending extreme caution in the matter. As has been seen, the Spanish Inquisition was not in favour of expel- ling the New Christians. False converts would be permanently lost. The Holy Office would not be able to use them as witnesses, an important aspect of the method of the Inquisition courts.

The answer to the problem was to increase the severity of the Inquisition, continued the document. All Judaizing apostates should be sent to row in the galleys, which was probably the harshest sentence after burning at the stake that the courts ever imposed. The other extreme is apparent in the case of Manoel Gomes da Costa, who also preoccupied the Inquisition. One example they mentioned, which goes to show just how irregular and subject to the pressures of the moment this whole question was, was Diogo Lopes Soeiro, honoured despite the fact that his mother had been condemned by the Inquisition.

Finally the king granted Gomes da Costa the honour he requested. Nevertheless, one of the points most in his favour was that he had paid large dowries to marry his daughters into Old Chris- tian families. The genuine Christians among the descendants of the converts thought that the presence of Judaizers caused the discrimination to which they were all subject.

The new minister had the Inquisitor-General replaced in by Friar Antonio de Sotomayor, who had taken a diplomatic view about how to treat the New Christians. Whether Olivares felt some friendliness towards Jews, as his enemies alleged, is hard to say.

He was a New Christian, born on the island of Madeira, who had been convicted of Judaizing and had appeared at an auto in Lisbon. He had lived for many years in the Jewish community of Amsterdam, where two of his brothers still dwelled, but had come to make his fortune in Seville. The Spanish monopoly of trade with the West Indies was under threat from British and Dutch intrusions into the Carib- bean. Spain had suffered two major setbacks.

The catastrophic defeat of the Armada of had demonstrated that she could not invade England; nor could she assert her dominance over the insurgent Dutch. At the same time, the stagnation of Spanish agriculture and the plagues of — had weakened Spain at home. The consequence was dis- illusion, the suspension of debt repayments to the Genoese bankers and, in , a truce between Spain and the recalcitrant Dutch.

Olivares understood that Spain needed New Christian help to finance her grand strategy. If the New Christians were to serve Spain and Portu- gal, some lessening of inquisitorial pressure would have to be tolerated.

As part of the search for the supreme interest of the State, from the second half of the Sixteenth century onward the Jews, previously expelled or forcibly baptized in most countries, had begun to make an appear- ance on the international mercantile stage.

Among the principal parti- cipants in the economic expansion which followed the explorations and colonizations of America, Africa and Asia were the Iberian New Christians, many of whom were crypto-Jews, or Marranos.

A dozen Portuguese Marranos came to live in Ham- burg in While the right of Jews to live in these areas was never absolute, and they were not infrequently admitted to one Italian city- state only to be expelled from another, from the s onwards the Republic of Venice, which dominated Mediterranean trade, granted rights of residence and became a powerful magnet for Iberian New Christians.

Other cities — Pisa, Mantua and Leghorn — followed the example of Venice. So long as they did not publicize their practices or cause offence to Christians they were tolerated. Groups of secret Jews lived in Rouen and in London. In , the private practice of Judaism was permitted by the burghers of this city, which would become the most famous of all the European ex-Marrano centres.

The New Christians took advantage of the immense changes which were coming about in the mercantile panorama as a result of trade with the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. In the middle of this energetic activity stood vibrant cities, open to the oceans: Seville, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg and later London, growing modern centres through which goods passed to and from the distant colonies.

The New Christians were active participants in this trade. They live in all the main commercial cities, of which the most important is Lisbon. These agents bought precious woods, jewels, sugar and spices and sent them to Europe. The customs duties on the import of this merchandise had risen, by , to 1. They exchanged goods for slaves which they then dispatched to Mexico and Cartagena de Indias, the massive walled harbour on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

Their energy multiplied commercial inter- change and the movement of money. They became experts in the trans- fer of large sums of cash, no easy task in days when roads were poor and unpoliced. This particular capacity was of vital value to the king of Spain who had to place massive amounts in cash in countries where his armies were fighting and where his fleets required victuals and stores.

Asientos or the placing of huge quantities of coin became a speciality of the New Christians. Others did business in Spain itself, importing colo- nial produce and exporting luxury goods to the rich colonial market.

Like their Jewish ancestors in the Middle Ages, the New Christians of the Iberian Peninsula developed the manufacture of cloth, silk and lace, as well as occupying themselves with farming royal, noble and ecclesi- astical taxes and collecting rents, as can be seen in any list of profes- sions of the victims of an auto de fe.

The grand financiers Whatever the doubts of the Church and the Inquisition, the realities of war and politics meant that the rulers of Spain had to use the financial opportunities offered to them by the presence of men who understood the mechanisms of international trade and the movement of money.

Spain needed loans secured by mortgaging future income. She also required efficient collection of revenues together with facilities to place enormous sums, provisions and war materials in specific places abroad at precise moments.

As well as the armies of Spain in Italy and Flanders, the New Christian merchants provisioned the great fleets of galleons which sailed from Lisbon and Cadiz. To negotiate the contracts, New Christian financiers flocked to Seville and to the Court in Madrid: 7 [The New Christians] played a role which was altogether out of proportion to their numbers in the trade of Western Europe.

The same language and the same essential culture prevailed among a larger or smaller circle in every port. Correspondence could be conducted over half the civilized world in the same tongue.

Most of the import- ant families were international, members being settled in each of the greatest centres. A commercial nexus was thus formed which has perhaps no parallel in history except the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages. Certain branches of commerce were almost entirely in the hands of these Marrano settle- ments. They controlled the importation of precious stones into Europe, both from the East Indies and from the West. The coral industry was a Jewish, or rather a Marrano, monopoly.

Trade in sugar, tobacco and similar colonial commodities rested largely in their hands. As yet they were not involved in the asientos, the annual contracts to lend funds and transfer large sums of cash to Flanders, central Europe and Italy.

Olivares was determined to fight this war with a healthy economy, which inclined him towards the New Chris- tians, towards systems of compulsory saving, drastic reductions in over- blown officialdom and any mechanism which would stimulate trade. The followers of St Ignatius of Loyola had always been rivals of the Domin- icans, who had spearheaded the earlier campaigns to baptize the Jews and now ran the Inquisition.

A few months later this junta circulated its proposals on how to treat the New Christians. The recommenda- tion that private family trees should be destroyed had as its purpose the concealing of the Jewish descent of so many New Christians who were always at risk from a blackmailer. Certainly there was no proposal to abolish the application of purity-of-descent statutes altogether, and, as has been seen, those New Christians whose parents or grandparents had been in trouble with the Inquisition were permanently marked by the Holy Office as potential Judaizers, which in many cases they were.

There was, therefore, an apparent attempt at liberalizing the way New Christians were treated. Such a change was politically essential. A report from the Council of Finance in the summer of revealed the desperate straits of the Treasury. Nobody could be found to accept the contracts to make funds available and supply war material. Olivares had been unable to persuade the cities of Castile to accept a reform of the taxation system.

It had taken six months to negotiate the asiento of with the Genoese bankers. The sum involved was 3,, ducats, but the Spanish Treasury would have to pay out an extra , or 28 per cent in bribes and losses on the exchange, without counting the intolerable interest rates charged.

The Council of Finance described the contract as one of the most onerous in many years. In addition, Olivares devalued the currency. Since the profits arising from the finance contracts included sizeable gains from exchanging Spanish money for other cur- rency, and from issuing and accepting bills of exchange, the suspension of payments was a hard blow for the Genoese.

The door was opening for the New Christian bankers of Lisbon and Seville. State bankruptcy was imminent. At the request of the king, prompted by Olivares, the Pope granted an amnesty of three months for the secret Jews to confess, if necessary, without incurring penalties. This was about the most that could be granted, and a long way from the tacit tolerance current in many European cities. The Portuguese Inquisitors had been discon- certed.

They insisted that though heretics were treated with great mercy in Portugal, they suspected that Your Majesty has given credit to the complaints and appeals sent by those of the Hebrew Nation who are seeking in this way to remove the authority of the Inquisition and discredit those who serve it, as they have tried to do many times before.

Effectively, at that time the Inquisition court was judging the notori- ous case of the Patient Christ Cristo de la Paciencia , which would end in a long-remembered auto de fe in July This was probably the case which encouraged a view not previously evident in all these high-level discussions. Sotomayor commented, in a deterministic tone that he had not used in the past, that the Jews carried their sin within them, despite baptism.

This was not a very Christian view, but was a common one in anti- Jewish polemics. And so, wrote Sotomayor, it was still right to hold suspicions against even genuinely Christian descendants of Jews. It was a strange view for an important Christian cleric to hold.

A few weeks later, he wrote that even penitent Jews, reconciled with the Church, could not be trusted. There were so many Judaizers and apostates among the New Christians that one could rightly suppose that they were all secret Jews. It is true that from their baptism until now the religious orders have been and are full of monks and nuns from this people, heedless of cost [of dowries for nuns?

They appear to join religious orders with such fervour that, even though the doors are sometimes closed to them because of private statutes [of purity of descent], they request dispensations in order to overcome the problem and they even leave their homeland to enter religious orders abroad.

If they did not Judaize, what reason was there not to treat them as equals? As Pilar Huerga Criado, who has studied crypto-Judaism in an area of Spain close by the Portuguese frontier, writes: Sotomayor clearly expressed the contradiction implied in accepting the argument of infected blood and rejection of the convert as such, while at the same time the New Christian was considered indispens- able, and formulae for retaining him were sought, even at the cost of opening the doors to honourable status.

Despite nearly a century of efforts by the Portuguese Inquisition, they wrote in their report, crypto-Judaism persisted to such a degree that any Portuguese living outside Portugal was considered to be a Jew.

In desperation, apparently, the Portuguese bishops brought up the old anti-Jewish calumnies, such as the killing of Christian children and the poisoning of wells. They even alleged that the offspring of unions between Old Christians and New Christians were effeminate. The recom- mendations of the Portuguese bishops may be taken, therefore, as important subterranean views, even though they were not put into effect. In the face of the usual opposition to this proposal, the king established yet another committee to look into the question.

One interesting point in this torrent of written documents presented at the highest levels, is that they rarely describe the New Christians as such. This must mean that many New Christians over the or so years since the mass baptisms of and had not mar- ried into Old Christian families. One reason for this may have been the unwillingness of the latter to associate with the descendants of Jews precisely because the purity of descent statutes would impede the access of later generations to offices and honours, but obviously endogamy would be essential among those New Christians who were concerned to preserve their Jewish status and the secrecy of their practices.

Matters now seemed relatively satisfactory for the New Christians. By the amounts involved had risen to two million ducats. By the middle of the seventeenth century seventy thousand Portuguese had migrated to Castile, and of these forty thousand had flocked to Mad- rid. The presence of Portuguese was even more marked because they settled in cities or specific areas, and in groups, like most immigrants, and involved themselves in commercial and financial occu- pations, ranging from the international banker with his private carriage and lackeys, to the humble street vendor of home-made lace, and from the farmer of the millones tax on household essentials to the simple tobacconist in a small town.

Nevertheless, 71 New Christians shared in the annual asientos from onwards. Meanwhile, as many as two thousand Portuguese merchants lived in Seville, exporting wool to Ven- ice, Leghorn and Flanders, trading with the Indies, importing cloth from Antwerp, France and Italy, bringing spices from the East, and creating a source of capital and credit.

Inevitably some New Christians surrendered to the temptation to display their wealth, their importance and in some cases their titles. Manuel de Cortizos, for example, rode in his own coach accompanied by uniformed lackeys. Here, on 16 February, , he offered the king and queen a gala reception with supper and a play.

It is hardly surprising that the rise of such people, Portuguese New Christians suspected of crypto-Judaism, should have provoked some dis- content. The Inquisition, however, feared nobody and continued its inexor- able attack on the Judaizing heresy. The ever-increasing arrival of Portu- guese New Christians led to a corresponding increase in the number of autos de fe. In Coimbra, two hundred victims appeared in On 18 July, stood on the public stage, and ten were relaxed to the secular arm to be burnt.

A year and a half later, on 14 May , an immense event took place. Four went to the flames while thirteen effigies of dead or escaped heretics were also burnt. The follow- ing month, Coimbra was the scene of another colossal auto, with victims, including eight who were burnt. In Lisbon, in September , heretics were reconciled with the Church. The issue, not merely of secretly observing the Law of Moses but of committing sacrilege against Christian religious objects, came to the fore in a notorious trial held in Madrid between and This was the matter of the Patient Christ, or Cristo de la Paciencia, as it came to be known, from a religious house built on the site of the dwelling where the sacrilege was supposed to have taken place.

In he agreed to make a personal loan to the Treasury of a quarter of a million ducats and to reduce from He was denounced to the Inquisition, probably for some personal enmity, by a New Christian woman, Juana de Silva, and, despite his political importance, was arrested in the spring or summer of Saraiva was suspected not only of Judaizing, of which there was abundant proof, but also of financial manipulations connected with his heresy.

Saraiva had placed silver and gold with ex-Marrano bankers in cities of the Marrano diaspora such as Amsterdam, Rouen and Bordeaux, where his father had lived until his death in This was probably true, for Saraiva maintained a network of New Christian agents in Bordeaux and Rouen. He was also accused of importing counterfeit currency and of massive smuggling operations through customs posts also controlled by New Christians. The trial was lengthy, and Saraiva did not appear at an auto de fe until 13 October, Probably through powerful friends and many state- ments in his favour, even from Jesuits — rivals of the mendicant orders which controlled the Inquisition — with whom he had commercial deal- ings, he did not go to the stake.

He had been tortured but had kept silent. It is even possible that some Inquisition functionary passed on to him the names of hostile witnesses, normally anonymous, so that Saraiva could identify his enemies. According to Inquisition procedure, the court was obliged to discount their testimony. Apart from evidence of his Cath- olic loyalties demonstrated by almsgiving and gifts to churches — he claimed that Olivares consulted him at critical moments.

Even so, the Inquisitors strongly suspected that Saraiva observed the Law of Moses. The gaoler reported that Saraiva had not eaten some of the prison rations, which made the court suspect that he was obeying the Jewish dietary laws.

It was assumed, therefore, that he must have been Judaizing before. She claimed that her husband had lost so much credit and wealth that she and her children no longer had the wherewithal to keep body and soul together.

The court accepted that he had brought a rabbi from Amsterdam to Bor- deaux to circumcise his father before he died. He had helped another who had come to Madrid from Salonika to collect funds to ransom cap- tives from pirates. He paid for lamps to burn in Amsterdam synagogues in memory of his dead relatives. Despite these proofs of Judaizing, however, he was forced only to abjure de vehementis — grave suspicions of heresy — and to pay a fine of 20, ducats.

But the Inquisition had him under observation and arrested him on the night of 13—14 April in his house in the Calle San Bernardo. As was usual in these trials, Febos denied the accusations. The first witness, an arrested Protestant, had been detained while carrying a draft for silver ducats drawn on Febos and signed by Lopo Ramires the ex-Marrano David Curiel in Amsterdam. This sort of evidence, much of it second- or third-hand, was not too convincing.

Another witness was Manuel Correa, the lover of a woman, Marta Pegada, who apparently frequented the Febos circle. He claimed that she had said that when she went to Judaize with the others they met in a certain house and a Portuguese priest performed the ceremonies of the Law of Moses in Mosaic vestments and in a glass case he had Moses and that the said priest read the Law and ordered her to fast all day and she said she would do so and went to her house and ate very well and that the meat eaten by those who met to Judaize had to be washed several times and all the fat and the blood had to be removed and it had to be mature mutton slaughtered according to the rites of the Law.

This account recalls the ceremonies described at the trial of Antonio Homem in Coimbra. They were a sort of artificial construction based on a reading of the ceremonies conducted in the biblical temple, very confused with Catholic rites. Was it a statue or a picture in a frame, as if Moses were to be compared to a holy image? The clearly Jewish part of what Manuel Correa remembered that his lover Marta had told him was the slaughter of the animal, the washing of the meat to rid it of blood, and the removal of the fat though Scripture requires only the intestinal fat to be cut away.

Another witness alleged that he had heard Febos deny the existence of Purgatory, say that he preferred the Old to the New Testament, boast of his Jewish origins and spit three times on a crucifix. Commercial Activities of the New Christians 63 These charges do not seem very convincing. Antonio de Acosta, the Madrid commercial agent of both genuine Christians and crypto-Jews in the same Rouen com- munity of Portuguese merchants, provided a list of observers of the Law of Moses in that city.

Febos defended himself, claiming that accusations of Judaizing arose from commercial rivalry. He gave the court a list of enemies of his fam- ily in Madrid, mostly people to whom he had refused loans.

He hoped that the anonymous denouncers were among them. The court had difficulties in making up its mind, but it was sure that Febos was not being frank and that he was hiding a great deal.

On 4 April they ordered him to be taken down to the torture chamber. Febos must have realised that the Inquisition did not have enough proof of his guilt. He resisted the immense pain and shock of torture. Unable to condemn him completely, the court imposed a moderate fine of ducats and required him to abjure de levis, that is, acts of which he was lightly suspected.

He escaped the shame of a public appearance at an auto de fe, abjuring in the hall of the court itself. Rouen, evidently, required an investigation by the Holy Office. An era of tolerance seemed about to begin in the peninsula, and so the Marranos returned. Unfor- tunately the atmosphere in Portugal soon changed and many of them were arrested the following year. Later that same year, fleeing New Christians again settled in Rouen, but this little group would be riven by internal feud and suspicion.

The peculiar procedures of the Inquisition meant that reconciled genuinely or not Marranos lived outside the peninsula side by side with New Christians who probably had not Judaized but were in danger because of their association or family ties with those who had.

Cisneros had been living in Rouen since His account is pre- served in a memoir he wrote for Philip IV, dated 9 April, Cisneros pointed out that there were many such Christians among the Portu- guese of Rouen. Given that Cisneros was a priest, he naturally explained the tension between the two groups of New Christians as a reflection of what he called the historical hatred of Jews for Christians. Among the twenty- three questions he sent to Saul Levi Morteira, a rabbi in Amsterdam, were basic issues of theology such as: How could it be proved, as the Jews insisted, that God cannot exist as a trinity, and that the Messiah will be a man and not divine?

Other questions showed that Cisneros was unable to comprehend Judaism outside the ambit of his own vision of the truth. In his memoir addressed to Philip IV he even cited important Jewish sources such as the Mishnah — the first codification of applied Jewish law — and the Mishneh Torah, the twelfth-century code of Maimonides, in connection with the attitude taken by Jews towards a Jew who adopts another religion.

However, he misread Jewish sources for his own purposes. Cisneros insisted that when a New Christian returned to Judaism and was cir- cumcised, he swore an oath to kill all apostates. This is an example of how an ancient and probably minority rabbinic opinion could be taken out of its context, when the important point was the practice rather than the theory.

Of course, Cisneros could never have produced an example of such a murder. Cisneros, nevertheless, gives an interesting picture of the real situ- ation in Rouen. Unlike in Amsterdam, where the Jews were allowed to live as Jews, in Rouen they still had to appear officially as Christians. Perhaps the very presence of the trouble-making Cisneros contributed to awakening the fears and suspicions of the Marranos of Rouen.

Cisneros gave useful information to the Inquisition about other refu- gee communities. He explained that there were three synagogues in Amsterdam and three in Hamburg, with a total of twelve thousand Jews. Venice had five synagogues, of which the two largest were Spanish and Portuguese.

There were others in Leghorn and Pisa. These synagogues were widely supported by other Jews, especially other ex-peninsular communities such as Antwerp, Paris, where there were ten or twelve families, Rouen with 22 or 23, Bordeaux with forty, Bayonne with over sixty, Dax with ten or twelve, Peyrehorade with over forty, La Bastide with over eighty and Nantes with a handful.

That is to say that Cisneros calcu- lated the Marrano population of France at about three hundred families. Besides, some, if not many, genuine Christians certainly were living among the Marranos of Rouen. In or , one of them pub- licly repented having returned to Judaism in Amsterdam.

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