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Chapter 2

Conversos: The Iberian Context

The history of early modern Spain is the story of several paradoxes. First and foremost, it is the story of a group of small Iberian kingdoms that evolved into a vast and fearsome empire, yet whose rulers and literati became so conscious of its economic weaknesses, that some Spanish critics became convinced that the Habsburg colossus could scarcely support itself throughout the very period when it was Europe’s only superpower. At a sociocultural level, the history of Habsburg Spain is the story of a society obsessed with notions of honor, nobility, and Christian orthodoxy, which nonetheless produced a large subculture of dishonor and impiety known to modern readers through the literary archetype of the picaro. Crucially, early modern Spain was an officially closed and culturally intolerant society that depended considerably on the economic activities of its persecuted minorities. A persistent Spanish preoccupation with the questions of “purity of blood” and “purity of faith” betrayed yet another, more fundamental paradox. This was the fact that early modern Iberian culture, despite its exclusionary bent, had actually incorporated and been deeply influenced by its designated outsiders, first by Jews and Moslems, later by Judeoconversos and moriscos, through centuries of intermarriage, voluntary conversions to Catholicism, forced assimilation, and daily contact.

The seventeenth century, Spain’s era of crisis, brought all of these paradoxes into sharp relief as the country’s economic and political life accentuated discrepancies between the chauvinistic ideologies that often colored Spanish aspirations on one hand, and the complex realities that shaped the larger panorama of Spanish life on the other. The tumultuous Spanish crisis of the 1600s is important to this study not only because it formed the background against which the drama of Judeoconverso “renegades” played itself out, but because the history of the crisis holds some of the keys to an understanding of the renegades’ behavior itself. The purpose of this chapter, then, is twofold: first, to sketch important aspects of a broad historical scenario in order to provide a historical framework for the individual and collective histories of returnees and spontaneous informers, particularly in what concerns these individuals’ fateful encounter with the peninsular inquisitions. Second, the chapter aims to place Judeoconversos (including the renegades) in that larger Hispanic context by highlighting key aspects of the economic and sociocultural roles that New Christians played within the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain, Portugal, and Portuguese Conversos

Throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century Spain¹ was the undisputed superpower of Latin Europe. The rich overseas possessions of Philip II (1556–98) dwarfed those of other Christian monarchs, while his European territories, including the Netherlands, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Duchy of Milan, rendered the Spanish crown a formidable force in continental politics. Spanish primacy was nothing new. Much of western and central Europe had experienced it during the regime of the Habsburg emperor Charles V (Charles I of Castile, 1516–58). Toward the end of Philip’s reign, however, a series of political and military victories (notably the suppression of the Dutch revolt in 1567–70 and 1579, and the defeat of Ottoman forces at the immense battle of Lepanto in 1571) had made Spanish political preponderance especially palpable.²

From the point of view of this study, the most significant Spanish conquest of the late sixteenth century was the annexation of Portugal, which was completed in 1580. This crowning achievement of Spanish empire-building gave concrete political expression to an idea that had shaped the ambitions and institutional self-image of Ibero-Christian kings in the Middle Ages, during the long period of the reconquista. I am referring to the concept, more specifically the goal, of Hispania: a united peninsular kingdom ruled by Christians and rooted in a “pure” Visigothic heritage.³

The unrealistic fantasy of ethnic and cultural “purity” aside, there were several reasons that Spain’s annexation of Portugal could not achieve the politicocultural ideal that partially undergirded it, even if Philip II was the first Habsburg to use the official title “King of España” after the merging of the two countries. Chief among these reasons was that the political union had been triggered by a dynastic dispute, not by amicable agreement or by a natural, “Hispanic” affinity between the Spanish and Portuguese realms. Furthermore, the union had been forced: Two years after King Sebastian of Portugal was killed in a military expedition to northern Africa, his uncle Philip of Spain invaded Portugal with an army of 37,000 men. A brief war finally realized the Habsburgian claim to the empty throne.⁴

Spain did not assimilate Portugal completely. The culture of the western kingdom, for one, remained virtually independent. Far from trying to Castilianize his new domain, Philip even tried to learn the language of his Portuguese subjects.⁵ As for political autonomy, the Spanish state took over some functions of the Portuguese government but left many others in the hands of native elites. Brazil and lesser Portuguese colonies remained under Portuguese control, while Portugal itself experienced relatively little Spanish interference in the internal administration of the country. For example, the wide authority of the Spanish Inquisition never eclipsed that of the Portuguese Holy Office. The Portuguese tribunal enjoyed substantial autonomy throughout the years of Spanish rule, and thus was able to cultivate a notorious ferocity with relatively few constraints.

The annexation of Portugal demands our attention because it greatly accelerated a momentous shift in the geographic distribution of peninsular Judeoconversos. Although the precise dimensions of the shift are not clear, it is indisputable that hundreds and probably thousands of Lusitanian conversos crossed the Portuguese border into Castile, Aragon, and Navarre during the period of Spanish control (1580–1640). In Spain the immigrants became targets of persecution at various levels. Both the newcomers and their descendants fell within the purview of the Spanish Inquisition.

The migrations effectively revived anti-converso persecution in Spain at a time when such persecution was on the wane (trials against alleged crypto-Jews were still legion in Portugal during the middle to late sixteenth century, while in Spain such trials had become comparatively infrequent after the 1490s).⁶ Spanish Judeophobia now acquired a distinctly anti-“Portuguese” accent. Not surprisingly, many Lusitanian conversos and their Spanish descendants went into exile, the former for the second time in their lives. A great irony of these developments was that many of the newcomers had left Portugal in order to escape intense hostility and, in particular, to avoid inquisitorial scrutiny.

Given the prosecutorial zeal of Lusitanian inquisitors, it is no coincidence that the steady movement of Portuguese New Christians to Spain commenced in the 1540s, just as the newly created Portuguese Holy Office (established in 1536) gathered momentum.⁷ John (João) III and his successor, the ill-fated Sebastian (Sebastião), issued several bans against New Christian emigration. Yet a number of conversos were able to sidestep such restrictions and establish firm roots in Castile prior to 1580.⁸ After the Spanish annexation the flow of Lusitanian conversos to Spain increased considerably. A new freedom of movement between the previously separate countries afforded members of Portugal’s New Christian minority a sterling opportunity to build new lives as residents of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and other Spanish domains. Philip III gave cristãos-novos an added incentive to move eastward when he granted them formal permission to leave their native soil in 1601. In exchange, he exacted a collective payment of 200,000 cruzados.⁹ Later, he negotiated with the pope to obtain a general pardon for those whom the Portuguese Inquisition had accused of Judaizing.¹⁰ Pope Clement VIII issued the exculpatory brief in 1604, prompting the release of 410 inquisitorial prisoners in Lisbon, Braganza, and Coimbra.¹¹ The cost to Lusitanian conversos in this case was between 1,700,000 and 1,800,000 cruzados, a sum intended to compensate the crown for its loss of inquisitorial confiscations.¹²

Philip’s policies did not mean that he was friendly to Judeoconversos as such, but rather that his government looked upon Portuguese New Christians as eminently exploitable resources. To understand the royal approach, it is instructive to remember that Philip’s liberality came at a high price. What is more, the king’s relative generosity did not apply to Spanish conversos. Neither did it curb the activities of the Spanish Holy Office against Portuguese or any other defendants.

Royal favor made for good policy in a purely strategic sense. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Lusitanian conversos were reputed to possess considerable wealth, while the Spanish crown was experiencing financial difficulties. Although a majority of Portuguese conversos were far from affluent, their total assets, including the fortunes of a few powerful families, may have totaled up to 75 million ducats.¹³ In favoring religious amnesty and encouraging immigration, then, Philip sought to draw wealthy conversos toward the Habsburg court so that their economic activities and sheer assets would provide a healthy stimulus to the Spanish economy. Whether the stimulus proved healthy or not, Philip was entirely successful in catalyzing it.

Especially during the middle decades of the seventeenth century the crown tapped the fortunes of Portuguese conversos as a matter of course in order to replenish the coffers of the Spanish state. For some royal officers, bartering governmental concessions for ready cash became a matter of naked self-interest as much as a matter of national economic strategy. Thus, for example, Philip’s prime minister, the Duke of Lerma, received an unofficial gift of fifty thousand cruzados from moneyed conversos for his role in the negotiations that paved the way for the papal pardon of 1604. For their part, each of the members of the Royal Council for Portugal received sixty thousand cruzados.¹⁴

There is ample evidence that wealthy Judeoconversos took advantage of the royal aperture to Spain, especially after the coronation of Philip IV (1621–65), whose first prime minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, inserted a number of them into the monarchy’s financial and administrative machinery.¹⁵ These prominent hombres de negocios (businessmen) were very few, however, compared to the multitude of ordinary Portuguese conversos who flocked to Castile and Aragon upon the Spanish annexation. What drew the less affluent cristãos-novos to Spain?

As Yosef H. Yerushalmi has observed, Castile-Aragon was wealthier than Portugal, so the lure of economic opportunity must have been substantial to rich and poor cristãos-novos alike.¹⁶ From a legal and political standpoint, Spain was most attractive to Portuguese Judeoconversos because the Spanish Inquisition did not punish any crimes committed in Portugal against the Catholic faith—even if Spanish inquisitors did make use of evidence collected by their Portuguese colleagues when prosecuting the immigrants for religious crimes allegedly committed in Spain. Also, Spanish authorities seldom extradited Inquisitorial prisoners to Portugal.¹⁷ Finally, in Yerushalmi’s words, “relative to the fury of Inquisitorial persecution in Portugal, Spain must have appeared … almost a refuge.”¹⁸ All of these factors meant that Portuguese New Christians enjoyed an enticing measure of legal immunity in Spain at the close of the sixteenth century. Such immunity would have been unthinkable in earlier times, when the Spanish Inquisition was most active against the first generations of Spanish Judeoconversos.

Before delving into the repercussions of the Portuguese migrations and drawing a collective portrait of rank-and-file converso immigrants, we must consider the historical context in which the migrations occurred. The three sections that follow outline the social and economic conditions that awaited Portuguese newcomers in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century—and awaited converso returnees throughout that period. A majority of the returnees I have studied were merchants who traveled to and from Madrid, and were living there at the time of their arrest or self-surrender. Consequently I devote the second of the three sections to an overview of conditions in the Spanish capital during the 1600s. The third section pays special attention to the network of commercial roads that converso merchants used, including the highways that linked the metropolis to New Castile, to the rest of Spain, to the neighboring kingdom of Portugal, and to the most accessible of all converso havens in Europe: southwestern France.

Spain at the End of the Golden Age

Historians have referred to the period from 1500 to 1650 as Spain’s Golden Age (edad de oro) or Golden Century (siglo de oro). Among other things, these terms remind us of the fact that during that period Castile extracted vast quantities of gold from America and spent them lavishly in Europe.¹⁹ Arguably Spanish dominance in the European continent, like the empire itself, would have been impossible to maintain without continuous access to the mineral treasures of the New World. At the very least it is evident that the flow of American gold and silver helped the Habsburgs to keep the Spanish economy afloat, to finance an ambitious foreign policy, and to fight several wars.²⁰

The sheer bulk of the treasure that Spain absorbed during the Early Modern Period tells its own tale. According to a recent study by Jean-Paul Le Flem, the Spanish economy imported an astonishing 151,561 kilograms of gold and close to 7.5 million kilograms of silver from 1503 through 1600.²¹ Especially during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, this unprecedented influx of precious metals triggered a steep increase in prices across Iberia and ultimately throughout western Europe. Despite the resulting inflation, the overall effect of gold and silver imports on the Spanish economy was beneficial at first because Spain’s productive capacities and its population had reached a peak in the 1550s. In other words, during the later 1500s there was sufficient demand for food and services that the bullion fueled an economic boom. Higher prices led to increased profits. Inflation also spurred trade and production, and brought more money into circulation. This, among other things, resulted in lower rates of interest and an increase in productive investment.²²

Throughout the Golden Century various Spanish thinkers interpreted their country’s political success and newfound wealth as a sign that Spaniards were God’s chosen people. They believed that España was the standard bearer of Christianity, since Spaniards had “discovered” and Christianized remote regions of the world while resisting internal and external threats to the (supposed) religious homogeneity of the country. These threats included Moorish power (during the reconquista) and Protestant “heresies.” In light of Spanish faithfulness, the argument went, was it not right and proper that Spain was the world’s strongest Christian state and the avant-garde of the Counter Reformation?²³

In 1601, for example, the Jesuit political observer Pedro de Rivadeneira explained that God had rewarded Spain with good fortune because in 1492 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile had previously expelled Moors and Jews from Spanish domains. Specifically, Rivadeneira argued that God had showed his pleasure by forever “cleansing” Spain of heretical Christian sects (such as the Protestant groups), and by “giving [Spanish kings] new realms, discovering with His hand a new world with treasures so many and so great that it is one of the greatest miracles that He has bestowed.”²⁴

From such heroic conceptions of nationhood other commentators inferred that Spaniards would redeem the world in a proximate future. For instance, in 1619 the commentator (and friar) Juan de Salazar concluded that the Spanish nation was heir to God’s scriptural promise to the chosen people.²⁵ “It is very consistent with reason,” Salazar wrote, “… that at the world’s end Spain should be the seat of the Universal Monarchy, which … all nations must obey….”²⁶ To underscore the supposed validity of his prediction, Salazar adduced several items of “proof.” The first six of these items are typical of the adulatory triumphalism that gripped many Spaniards of his generation:

First … [we know that Spain will redeem the world because of] the situation of the Catholic King [Philip III], which, more than that of any other Christian prince, puts him in position to obtain [the universal monarchy], because he is lord of so many lands and provinces and of so many rich and great realms and states in all four corners of the world.…

Second … [we can infer the king’s divine mission from] the title that the Church has given him, Most Catholic King, which means and signifies universal king.

Third, [we know of Spain’s divinely ordained role from] the solid and fundamental causes (godliness, prudence, and fate) that concurred in the creation of the Spanish monarchy.…

Fourth … [we can infer Spain’s divine role from] the catholic and sincere faith that [Philip] professes, without admixture of error or heresy, and [from] the singular obedience he shows to the pope, Vicar of Christ on earth, which…is the foundation and principal basis of the augmentation and conservation of all empires and kingdoms.

Fifth … as [the Hebrew prophet] Daniel maintains … total dominion will be given to the saintly people of the Most High. [As we have seen,] the Spanish nation is God’s beneficiary in the Law of Grace [meaning the New Testament], and has assumed the place that the elect [the Jews] had in the time of Scripture [the Old Testament] because it has (like the Israelites themselves) conformed best to the rule of faith enunciated by St. Paul, according to which a Christian’s actions must be measured.

Sixth, [we can infer Spain’s messianic role from] the prophecies and prognostications [of the prophets Daniel, Obadiah, and others] concerning the diminution of the Ottoman house and the enlargement of that of Spain, which according to common knowledge are the two [houses] that aspire to the universal monarchy.… We have already seen fulfilled the first part of [these prophecies] in the marvelous expulsion of the moriscos (last vestiges of the Mohammedans), which the majesty of Philip III accomplished in 1610[;] we may rest assured that the second part [of the prophecies], concerning the ruin of the Turk will also be fulfilled. As Gregory the Great affirms, when many things are announced to us, it is a good sign to see many of them fulfilled, because [this means that] the others too will take their intended effect.²⁷

Notwithstanding the hubris and messianic delirium of imperial power, the stark fact remained that Spanish political might rested on a relatively fragile economic base. Numerous events exposed and aggravated this problem during the seventeenth century.

Historians disagree as to what specific incidents triggered the so-called Spanish “decline” of the 1600s.²⁸ However, there is little dispute about the existence of a multifaceted crisis with economic roots (or, more specifically, a chain of related crises) that brought Spain from its towering position as the military and religious hegemon of the western world to that of an impoverished, second-rate power.

Augured by the state’s bankruptcies of 1575, 1596, and 1627, the economic exhaustion of Spain was blatant by the end of the seventeenth century.²⁹ Gold and silver imports from America diminished considerably throughout the latter 1600s, so much so that in 1654 even the royal court could not find adequate means to pay or feed all of its members.³⁰

Perhaps the most obvious symptom of the crisis was the demise of Spain’s political supremacy in Europe. Downfall came principally via the revolt and secession of Portugal (1640), the signing of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and the unfavorable conclusion of war with France (1659). The first of these events revealed that Hispania was a romantic illusion. The second event effectively ended the French wars of religion and gave the Dutch provinces their political and religious independence after a draining century of conflict with Spain. The third event confirmed a new balance of power in the continent as Spain ceded parts of Catalonia and the Netherlands to France, the new continental hegemon.³¹ The French and Portuguese conflicts were especially significant in that, unlike other imperial wars, they brought death and destruction to the Spanish mainland. Furthermore, both conflicts necessitated the conscription of thousands of Spanish civilians, since most of the country’s professional soldiers were fighting the empire’s other wars outside the Iberian Peninsula.³² For its part, the case of the United (Dutch) Provinces provided clear evidence that Spain was incapable of imposing Catholicism on its own imperial turf, much less across the European continent. Finally, all three episodes demonstrated that Spain could no longer shoulder its multiple imperial commitments in Europe.³³

Aside from these and other geopolitical misfortunes, there were serious domestic crises that imperiled the political stability and cohesion of the Spanish realm at the end of the “Golden Century.” Regionalist sentiment and lordly recalcitrance erupted at a time when Philip IV and his chief ministers were attempting to harness the resources of all his Iberian subjects for the expensive task of maintaining the empire. From 1641 to 1652, in the midst of a heated war with France, Catalan peasants and burghers rose against the crown. Royal arms alone could not suppress the rebellion, which subsided only under the double impact of a plague and of French encroachment of Catalan territory. Also in 1641, and again in 1648, powerful lords instigated secessionist plots in Andalusia and Aragon. Both conspiracies failed when their leaders were discovered. Nevertheless, these episodes were like the northern revolt in that they revealed a volatile undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Castilian authority in general, and with the Habsburgs’ fiscal demands in particular. Unhappily for the Spanish crown, similar discontent inspired secessionist revolts as far away as Sicily and Naples in 1647 and 1648.³⁴

It is not necessary to dwell here on the disasters of the seventeenth-century crisis in order to explain it. After all, the diminution of Spanish power was not the result of particular military or political setbacks. Rather, these setbacks were signs of a structural corrosion; specifically, they showed that the Spanish economy was not strong enough to sustain the country’s imperial role.

Spain’s economy had at least two fundamental defects that the boom of the 1500s did not eliminate. First, the country suffered from a dearth of cultivable land; second, it suffered from chronically low levels of entrepreneurial investment, especially in industrial ventures.³⁵ In light of recent historiography on the Habsburg colossus, it is clear that historians have for too long exaggerated these and related deficiencies.³⁶ Nevertheless, the consequences of the deficiencies cannot be wholly denied. For example, it is clear that by the seventeenth century Spain had developed an abject dependence on imported products. The country’s heavy reliance on foreign manufactures sometimes caused local industry to decline, particularly in provincial towns and in cities such as Toledo. In addition, the relative absence of a native class of capitalist investors, coupled with ballooning imperial expenses, made for constant governmental insolvency, a large fiscal debt, and the crown’s almost total reliance on the services of foreign financiers and on the sale of local jursidictions.³⁷ To make matters worse, the scarcity of arable land heightened the country’s relative vulnerability to famine.³⁸ When severe food shortages occurred, malnutrition left the surviving peasants and townspeople unable to resist epidemic disease. John Lynch has estimated that the total number of plague-induced fatalities for the period 1600–1700 was an astonishing 1,250,000.³⁹ More than wars and emigration to the Indies, recurrent epidemics caused the decline of the total Spanish population from 8.4 million in the 1590s to barely 7 million a century later.⁴⁰ It is not an exaggeration to say that, despite the politically motivated exaggerations of local petitioners to the crown, the seventeenth century saw the dramatic hemorrhaging of Spain.

To the picture of structural weakness and demographic loss we must add two key, exacerbating factors. First, large increases in royal taxation; second, the royally decreed expulsion of moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609–11.

Let us look at the first factor. Throughout the Early Modern Period, but especially during the seventeenth century, the Habsburg crown imposed increasingly onerous taxes on commoners in order to satisfy the demands of the imperial budget. The state thus deepened socioeconomic cleavages and effectively subsidized wasteful consumption at the royal court.⁴¹ More importantly, heavy taxation drove many peasants to destitution, out of the countryside, and toward urban centers, principally toward Madrid and Seville.⁴² The prospect of fiscal exploitation represented a serious, if ultimately surmountable challenge to the economic viability of Castile, where the land was generally arid and infertile relative to that of other regions.⁴³ In the cities, former peasants and townspeople became part of a burgeoning mass of unemployed or underemployed city dwellers. Unhygenic slums grew at a vertiginous pace, making Spanish cities prime breeding grounds of disease.⁴⁴

As for the second factor: The expulsion of the moriscos was a drastic action that virtually eradicated what Ibero-Catholic chauvinists had for years construed as a principal menace to the religious and physical “purity” of Christian Spain.⁴⁵ Crucially, the mass eviction diminished Spain’s already limited productive capacities. A high proportion of the nearly three hundred thousand banished moriscos were agricultural laborers. Their sudden dislocation meant the disappearance of a key productive element in the peninsular economy.⁴⁶ For the fertile region of Valencia, where moriscos had been a large minority, the expulsion was destabilizing in the short term.⁴⁷

The case of the moriscos is notable (among other reasons) because the victims were of one ethnicity. Yet the Spanish crisis of the seventeenth century took a heavy toll on ordinary Spaniards across all ethnic lines. I have already alluded to the highly lethal and virtually incessant epidemics and wars of the 1600s; to the rapid growth of Madrid; to the fiscal exploitation of the peasantry and townsfolk by royal overlords; and finally, to the economic challenges that faced Castile, where a number of towns became bankrupt. It therefore goes without saying that the human cost of the Spanish crisis was enormous, not only in terms of lives lost, but in material and in psychological terms. A widespread perception of systemic crisis undoubtedly conditioned Spaniards’ attitudes toward their own society, including, of course, conversos and other disadvantaged groups.

Under what precise circumstances did residents of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre experience the country’s tribulations? How did ordinary men and women live in the century of the Spanish crisis? The present overview cannot answer these questions comprehensively. However, I will attempt to provide a limited answer by sketching a socioeconomic profile of two domains, already mentioned, in which converso merchants were especially active: (1) the Spanish metropolis, Madrid, which became the largest single commercial market in the Iberian Peninsula over the course of the late 1500s and the 1600s; (2) the vast network of Iberian trade routes that served the capital and other Spanish and Portuguese cities.

Madrid in the 1600s

Material scarcity and sheer physical discomfort pervaded daily life in the otherwise vibrant Madrid of the seventeenth century. The main reason for this was that the city lay on a dry and semibarren plain and did not have the advantage of a nearby, navigable river by which to receive supplies and dispose of waste matter. Another reason was that the roads that connected the capital to the rest of the country were of poor quality. They slowed the pace of commerce and occasionally aggravated shortages of food and vital commodities.⁴⁸ Worse still, the cost of urban living was high for all of Madrid’s residents because of the enormous expense of transporting goods into the city on inadequate roads.

Compounding these problems was a demographic explosion that had begun in 1561, when Philip II made Madrid his permanent capital. From that year onward, the city grew at a dizzying pace. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Madrid had been a town of no more than 30,000 people. By 1650, the city had over 150,000 inhabitants.⁴⁹ This expansion far surpassed the crown’s ability and willingness to create a viable urban infrastructure, much less control the effects of overcrowding.

Despite its considerable growth, the metropolitan economy evolved primarily in response to the needs and wants of the court, not those of the city’s ballooning population. As Richard Mackenney has caustically observed, the urban colossus existed only to serve a class of political residents: “A few people made coaches, [and] many more watched them roll by … [which highlighted] a curious [parallel] between the unproductive world of the elite and its parody, the unproductive world of the pícaros.”⁵⁰

In global terms, early modern Madrid exported far less than it imported, and consumed much more than it produced.⁵¹ An artless apologist inadvertently highlighted this fact in 1658 when he wrote, “… [O]nly foreigners work on the goods used by the capital, and this very fact proves that all other nations labor for Madrid, the overlord of all other capitals since all of them work for her and she serves none.”⁵² In other words, the Habsburg capital, like the rest of the country’s major cities, was economically and politically formidable, yet grossly dependent on its external suppliers. The latter certainly included converso merchants. Consonant with the inward orientation of the greater urban economy, Madrid’s strongest industries did not cultivate foreign demand for their products and services. For example, the crafts of embroidery, gilding, and tailoring thrived only because they transformed imported materials into luxury goods for local courtiers, government officials, and aristocrats.⁵³

Madrid’s evolution was semichaotic and largely unplanned, hence the city was a grim and uncomfortable place. A majority of its residents were of modest means and lived in squalor, while a significant minority of wealthy denizens lived in private pockets of great luxury. High officers of the church and the royal bureaucracy, influential courtiers, members of the upper nobility, foreign dignitaries, and a handful of affluent merchants comprised the urban elite. Members of this moneyed class were the only ones (besides the royal family) who could afford to own mansions with stone facades, expensive carriages, and protective cocoons consisting of guards and servants.

In terms of its physical appearance, seventeenth-century Madrid offered an array of contrasts between superpatriotic fantasies of Spanish power, wealth, and dignity on one hand, and the reality of economic distress and social disorder on the other. There was considerable irony, for instance, in the fact that the physiognomy of the so-called Capital of Two Worlds (the “Old” and the “New”) was the product of a relative negligence.⁵⁴ As Madrid’s population expanded during the 1600s, the city’s avenues, alleys, and footpaths developed haphazardly, forming dark and confusing passages.⁵⁵ With the exception of a few main concourses, all streets were unpaved and therefore extremely dusty or muddy depending on the season.⁵⁶

Plain structures of gray brick and earth dominated the city’s drab landscape owing to the fact that limestone and other choice building materials were scarce. High municipal taxes all but prohibited the construction of second stories.⁵⁷ Most city homes were therefore indecorously low. In addition, a majority of residential dwellings had small, paper-covered holes instead of paned windows because the price of glass was beyond the means of ordinary builders, not to mention the residents themselves.⁵⁸ These tiny holes limited the penetration of dust, rain, and extreme temperatures into domestic spaces. Yet the holes also made for dim interiors and could seldom prevent the entry of an endemic stench—the smell of stagnant refuse. As many travelers to the Spanish capital observed, the total absence of a municipal system of waste disposal meant that most madrileños dumped their excrement and other trash in the open. Favorite dumping sites included portals, main thoroughfares, and street corners.⁵⁹ In addition to fomenting disease, ubiquitous garbage gave the capital an unenviable reputation among foreigners as the filthiest city in Europe.⁶⁰

If Madrid’s endemic filth indicated that the city had swelled to unmanageable proportions, periodic disasters provided conclusive proof that the city’s sheer size invited total chaos. Epidemic diseases gestated in the unsanitary conditions of the slums, causing many casualties. The fire of 1631 destroyed much of the city’s central promenade and marketplace, the Plaza Mayor. It also killed a dozen people and sparked three days of flagrant looting of the surviving property.⁶¹

The plunder could not have come as a surprise, for despite the city’s intense economic activity and sheer economic weight, poverty plagued virtually all areas of the capital. Indigence had become so deeply entrenched over the course of the seventeenth century that there existed an entire underclass of desperate madrileños, including beggars, street thieves, prostitutes, and all manner of transients—pilgrims, demobilized soldiers, and the like. A disdainful observer complained, “The streets of Madrid … are [always] crowded with vagabonds and loafers who while away the time playing cards, waiting for the soup kitchens of the monasteries to open or to get ready to ransack a house.”⁶² With similar contempt, a journalist grumbled in 1637 that no one in the capital was safe after sundown because of the large numbers of criminals who prowled the streets.⁶³ A class of metropolitan pícaros, then, was not a mere figment of the literary imagination of social satirists; it was an all too real reminder of the harsh reality of the time.

The educated pamphleteers known as arbitristas were among the most eloquent observers of Madrid’s condition.⁶⁴ Several of these polemicists perceived what modern historians have identified as basic faults in the metropolitan economy. For instance, in 1616 the city magistrate Mateo Lopez Bravo argued that the maldistribution of wealth had worsened the economic inefficiency of Madrid by creating too many idlers at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.⁶⁵ For their part, the French travelers Barthélemy Joly, Antoine de Brunei, and Francois Bertaut (who were not arbitristas) pointed out in 1604, 1655, and 1659, respectively, that Madrid, like Spain as a whole, seemed incapable of producing and accumulating wealth. These tourists’ writing paints the insatiable metropolis as a mere channel through which American gold flowed to Spain’s European competitors while the latter funneled their manufactures into Spain.⁶⁶

Recent scholarship has confirmed the basic accuracy of assessments such as Brunei’s, yet it has also corrected a tendency of the arbitristas, of foreign observers, and of several historians to overstate the gravity of the Spanish crisis. New research has shown that while an economic depression was certainly real at the national level, it affected different Iberian regions differently, at different times, and was not always so deep that it embraced all aspects of local economies.⁶⁷ Even wars, for instance, did not cause a cessation of Spanish international trade, not even with Spain’s wartime enemies.⁶⁸

Though mired in poverty and crime, Madrid had a bustling economy because it was the economic and political nerve center of the Iberian Peninsula. The court alone was an enormous consumer of imports. So too was the large urban population that served it. As the hub of a complex economic system, Madrid had unparalleled access to the wealth of Spain and its far-flung possessions. In return for the service of governing the Habsburg Empire, the city received a host of taxes and revenues. By offering lucrative and prestigious governmental offices, Madrid also attracted nobles from the provinces who brought rents from their estates to the city. The resulting concentration of wealth in the capital was unprecedented in Spanish history. This concentration meant that Madrid had an equally unprecedented power to attract vast resources from beyond the Iberian hinterland. Simply put, Madrid became an enormous consumption-oriented market, and thus a giant magnet for long-distance trade.⁶⁹ As we shall see in subsequent sections, Madrid provided commercially inclined New Christians—including Portuguese immigrants, native Spanish conversos, and especially returning exiles of both groups—plentiful opportunities to make a living, even in periods of economic depression.

Beyond Madrid, there were other areas of Spain (encompassing Portugal until 1640) that were economically viable, if not always prosperous, and therefore especially attractive to conversos during the seventeenth century. Seville, the gateway to the riches of the New World, stood apart as the most economically vibrant pivot of the realm. Further inland, a few medium-sized cities functioned as the axes of peninsular commerce. Valladolid remained the economic center of the Leonese province despite the city’s loss of preeminence after a brief stint as the seat of the Habsburg court (1601–4).⁷⁰ Burgos and Bilbao were main links in the northern trade routes that covered the Basque country and Old Castile. In particular, Bilbao enjoyed a relative reprieve from the hardships that beset major economic centers in the Peninsula because it was a main exporter of iron (crucial for arms manufacturing in an age of constant war) and because it emerged as the wool-exporting capital of Spain during the 1600s, at a time when wool was one of the country’s chief products.⁷¹ Zaragoza was economically prominent in the Aragonese interior, while Barcelona and Valencia were the economic capitals of the northeastern and far eastern coasts, respectively. Lisbon, Porto, La Coruña, Cadiz, Malaga, and other ports formed a crucial outer rim of the Iberian Peninsula’s commercial and industrial networks (see Map 1). Converso merchants frequented and conducted business in all of these economic centers.

Besides major cities, there were numerous nodes of industrial and agricultural production that continued to function despite the general economic downturn of the 1600s. Most larger cities and principal rural centers were linked by a system of major roads that converged in Madrid, a fact that attested to the geographic and economic centrality of the Spanish capital (see Map 1). These roads were a fundamental component of the economic life of the country, for much Iberian trading was done by land.

Peninsular Trade Routes: Some Salient Aspects

The transportation infrastructure of early modern Spain was an amalgam of different roadways dating from the times of the Romans, the Muslims, and the Catholic monarchs. Toward the end of the sixteenth century most peninsular carreteras or calzadas (highways) and caminos (roadways or trails) were in a state of disrepair. For example, in 1593 the arteries surrounding Valladolid were so deteriorated that according to municipal officials, “people cannot walk on them.”⁷²

Given copious evidence of the sorry state of Spanish highways, one might conclude that the crown was not interested in maintaining an adequate system of roads, yet that was not entirely the case. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile built some of the main peninsular thoroughfares, while their Habsburg successors invested in ones that linked Madrid to the periphery.⁷³ The central problem, then, was the upkeep of a vast majority of the country’s roads and bridges. That task usually fell upon local authorities such as lords and municipalities.

According to David Vassberg, local agents were not particularly effective in maintaining the country’s infrastructure.⁷⁴ One reason for this was that the authorities were not always able to secure the necessary manpower to undertake road repairs: Local villagers avoided construction and maintenance work because it was usually unpaid. A second problem was financial. Already impoverished by crushing fiscal obligations, local citizens tended to resist extraordinary taxes earmarked for infrastructural improvements, while travelers were often loath to pay usage tolls since (to paraphrase Vassberg) these levies were meant for the maintenance of somebody else’s roads.⁷⁵

Most of Spain’s principal thoroughfares were unpaved. Some public highways encompassed stretches that were no more than well-trodden trails.⁷⁶ Consequently a number of so-called carreteras were barely fit for travel by coach. A French tourist commented in 1659 about the rough paths that led to the capital, “everything arrives [in Madrid] by land, and not by coach as in France, but on asses and mules which is one of the reasons that all merchandise … [is] so costly there.”⁷⁷

Commerce by overland routes was a predominantly seasonal activity. Because most commercial roads had earthen surfaces, they became very dusty in dry months (August, September, and October) and totally impassable in wet ones (December and January).⁷⁸ To make matters worse, the accumulation of snow hindered or totally impeded traffic at high altitudes. Many calzadas were thus effectively useless for nearly half of the year. It is not surprising that some highways actually consisted of several alternative routes, each of which was intended to compensate for the frequent closure of the other routes.⁷⁹

Throughout the Early Modern Period, commercial land traffic in Spain consisted mainly of mule caravans and assorted carretas (carts). Outside of seasonal peaks, and especially when the weather discouraged traveling, road traffic diminished as agricultural laborers retreated to their farms to plow, sow, and harvest.

Map 1. Principal Roads of Habsburg Spain, 1608–84. Source: Santos Madrazo, El sistema de comunicaciones en España, 1750–1850 (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1984). The image above is a composite of Madrazos’s “Mapa 4” and “Mapa 6.” The former is a reconstruction of an itinerary by Ottavio Cotogno (1608); the latter is a reconstruction of a survey by Giuseppe Miselli (1684).

Itinerant merchants who traversed Spanish highways were known as arrieros, buhoneros, and trajineros. Of these commercial travelers, rural producers were most likely to use ox-driven carts to transport merchandise. Pack mules and donkeys were easier to handle in mountainous regions, and were commonly preferred by poorer wayfarers and by full-time salesmen whose goods could be borne by one or a few beasts.⁸⁰

Traveling on inadequate roads was an exhausting, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous and expensive affair. Arrieros and other voyagers usually had to pay local highway tolls. Merchants who traveled long distances also had to pay royal customs (usually set at 10 percent) at posts located between Castile, the Basque lands, Navarre, Aragon, and the Andalusian province.⁸¹ Of course, traveling comerciantes had to meet the additional cost of any merchandise they purchased on the road, not to mention the cost of food and lodging.

Stays at rural and urban inns, usually called mesones or posadas, were the nightly lot of most merchants who traveled beyond a day’s riding or walking distance. Typical hosting establishments were humble places run by peasants or poor city dwellers, and were known for being filthy and generally uncomfortable. Mesones offered travelers little more than some straw to sleep on, a modest amount of food for pack-bearing animals, and a stall to keep the animals. Local ordinances in many towns forbade the sale of food by innkeepers. Therefore, in order to have meals, guests often had no choice but to purchase uncooked ingredients at local markets and then ask the innkeepers to prepare the ingredients. Alternately, travelers could go to local taverns, whose keepers were infamous for serving rotten and otherwise revolting food.⁸²

The fact that itinerant merchants carried money and commercial goods made these voyagers attractive targets in the eyes of thieves at lodging sites and on the roads. Although Spanish thoroughfares were relatively safe in some areas,⁸³ road banditry was a manifest danger in regions where the disorder of war and civil uprisings had loosened the grip of law and order. Such was the case in Catalonia, elsewhere along the border with France, and as far south as Valencia, throughout the seventeenth century.⁸⁴

Besides having to beware of bandits, wayfarers had to contend with an understandable sense of isolation as they traveled long distances through alien territory, particularly when they traversed regions as desolate and sparsely populated as early modern Castile. François Bertaut, a traveler from France, observed in 1659 that Castilian villages were so far apart that one could ride for an entire day without seeing a single person.⁸⁵ It is no surprise that many voyagers banded together for purposes of security and companionship. Even this practice, however, could not erase the stigma of being “foreign” in a country where rural and urban folk were typically prejudiced against forasteros (outsiders).

As Vassberg has explained, local solidarity in early modern Spanish towns and villages was so intense that it encouraged an exclusionist attitude toward anyone who was not a vecino—a taxpaying citizen of the local municipality or federation of municipalities.⁸⁶ Prejudice against outsiders took many forms. Some forms were patently discriminatory. For example, local officials often fined forasteros more than local residents for violating the same ordinances.⁸⁷ Rules governing local marketplaces enshrined the spirit of exclusion in similar fashion. A common municipal policy was to prohibit the sale of outside products until local supplies had been exhausted. A corollary to that approach was to proscribe the sale of inside products to aliens until all internal demand had been satisfied.⁸⁸ Through this and a myriad of similar regulations, protectionism became well entrenched in Spanish towns and villages during the Early Modern Era. This form of economic exclusionism worked against non-native, itinerant traders chiefly by limiting their ability to compete. In all likelihood it also encouraged these traders to specialize in the sale of items that were not available locally.

Prejudices against outsiders contributed to the periodic eruption of conflicts between travelers and local citizens. Such disputes were especially difficult to restrain in remote places where the reach of police authorities was limited. For example, in rural Huelva during the mid-1550s, vecinos complained that fights between natives and forasteros broke out frequently at local inns. According to the worried villagers, such disorders occurred “without justice or punishment,” even when the confrontations were lethal.⁸⁹

As if a general distrust of foreigners were not grave enough, the perception that forasteros were inimical to local communities acquired a racist coloring where members of marginalized ethnic groups were involved. Popular stereotypes of moriscos, gypsies, and Judeoconversos as inherently dangerous and deceitful were among the oldest ideological lenses through which Old Christians viewed travelers who belonged to these suspect “castes.” Portuguese conversos were uniquely vulnerable to ethnic and religious hostility in the roads and cities of Spain because they were doubly conspicuous. Old Christian prejudice marked Luso-conversos not only as forasteros (recent Portuguese arrivals often spoke Castilian with a noticeable accent), but also as putative heretics—or more crassly, as “Jews”—by virtue of their Jewish ancestry.

The following episode illustrates some of the perils that Portuguese conversos were liable to encounter while traveling in Spain during the seventeenth century.

The Case of Diego Pereira

On October 15, 1661, two friars appeared uninvited at the house of Francisco Esteban de Cebada, a Toledan inquisitor. The friars, Pedro Mártir⁹⁰ and Anselmo de la Huerta, informed Cebada that a Portuguese man who had traveled with them from Andalusia to Castile had “done and said some things” that had made them “suspicious of the [man’s] faith.”⁹¹

Later that day, the inquisitor summoned Mártir so that the Dominican could relate his suspicions in detail.⁹² Mártir testified that on the previous Sunday he (Mártir), Friar Huerta, and three others were traveling northward through the city of Ecija when a tall man had stopped them to ask how to reach the highway to Cordoba. The man, who was Portuguese, identified himself as Diego de Silva.⁹³ Mártir told him to follow them, as they too were headed for Cordoba.

The friar continued that when the party stopped to eat at a small country inn, Silva had behaved strangely. According to Mártir, Silva hid behind some wall-matting until the others had finished eating a back of pork. Only then, when the party had totally consumed the pork and the innkeeper brought some cooked rabbits to the table, had Silva emerged from his hiding place to ask if any food remained. When Mártir and the others asked their new road-mate why he had stood behind the matting instead of partaking in the main course of the meal, the latter allegedly did not respond. This made the friar and his companions “suspicious” of Silva.⁹⁴ Although Mártir did not explain the group’s misgivings, his clear implication was that both he and his traveling partners had smelled the presence of a secret Jew in their midst: Why would a man from Portugal (as opposed to, say, a Spanish morisco) avoid eating pork, unless he were a converso Judaizer?

Mártir recounted that after the group had arrived at an inn in the city of Cordoba, he devised a plan to test Silva. First the friar took out a ham from his road provisions. Then, “with premeditation,” he and his comrades maneuvered Silva to a table and pressured him to eat the ham. Friar Huerta later testified about the incident that Mártir told Silva “you will eat [the ham] because there is nothing else to eat,” to which the latter “made a very bad face,” evidently displeased at the prospect of consuming pork (fol. 7r). Another witness, Diego de Castilla, reconstructed the scene slightly differently. He said that Mártir told Silva that he, Silva, would have to eat the ham “even if he didn’t want to” (fol. 8v).

At one point, Mártir continued, a Flemish fellow traveler by the name of Mathias shone a candle under the table and discovered that Silva had not swallowed the ham but had merely tasted it and furtively thrown pieces of it to the floor. According to Mártir, all the members of the traveling cohort were outraged when they saw the half-chewed scraps under the table, and “started calling [Silva] a Jew” (fol. 3r). To this the Lusitanian allegedly responded with the enigmatic statement that their insults did not bother him because he was a prophet (ibid.). According to Mártir, Silva then took some slivers of tocino (pig fat) that remained on his plate and put them in his mouth, as though to prove that he was perfectly capable of swallowing pork, but spit them out immediately in apparent disgust (fol. 3r–3v).

By October 14, Mártir could no longer stifle his intense misgivings about the Portuguese traveler. When the group arrived at the Castilian town of Malagón, he confronted Silva by asking him if he knew the tenets of Christian dogma. Silva allegedly said that he did not know religious doctrine, and asked Mártir if he would teach it to him. Naturally, Mártir thought it exceedingly suspicious that a man such as the suspect, who had not denied being a Christian and appeared to be more than forty years of age, should be totally ignorant of Christian beliefs. He therefore tested Silva by asking a simple but highly provocative question: Who is God? Silva allegedly answered that God was “the Eternal Father.” Mártir considered this an equivocal rejoinder—he probably interpreted it as a “Judaic” slight of trinitarian doctrine—so he challenged his Portuguese counterpart to say “how many persons were in the Holy Trinity [sic]” (fol. 3v). To this provocation Silva allegedly responded, “Don’t people say that they are three?” and duly named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The friar then asked Silva which of the three holy persons had died. Silva allegedly stood up to think about the question for a moment, and answered with a tentative query of his own: “Don’t they say that it was the Son?” Exasperated and furious at such vacillation, Mártir lashed out at Silva, calling the Portuguese traveler a “Jewish dog,” and threatening to denounce him to the Inquisition (ibid.).

This was not all. Mártir also claimed that Silva had uttered the Christian credo on demand, but that he had stopped short of the end after saying the phrase “creator of heaven and earth.” The friar stated that when he pressed Silva to continue reciting the creed, Silva refused. To Mártir this refusal was conclusive proof that Silva was a Judaizer, since the remaining portion of the credo concerned, in Mártir’s words, “the sin of the Jews” (namely, their unbelief in Jesus’ divinity) and hence contained ideas that a real Jew would be loath to proclaim. Mártir further testified that when he told Silva as much, the latter allegedly repeated his obscure claim that he was a prophet, adding that as such he could live “in whatever law he wanted,” meaning that he could follow any religion he pleased (fol. 4r).

In later testimony, the friar stated that he had asked the suspect whether he was traveling northward to escape the Sevillian Inquisition, which had recently taken many people into its custody (presumably under suspicion of heresy). Mártir maintained that Silva did not answer this challenge, but instead asked a young Frenchman who was traveling with them “if there was an Inquisition in France.” When the youth told him that there was not, Silva allegedly replied, “Well, then [France] is where I am going” (fol. 4v).

Mártir’s deposition continued with a claim that earlier, at a meson in Ciudad Real, Silva had requested a meal and had become agitated when the innkeeper did not give him the food for which he had asked. Cursing angrily, Silva allegedly declared (among other things), “I renounce the Jewish whore who gave birth to me!” Later, on the road to Toledo, Silva’s baggage fell from his mule and became soiled, upon which he allegedly began cursing again, saying such things as “I renounce the law of God!” and blaming Mártir for his trouble (fol. 4r).

Following Mártir’s deposition, the Toledan Inquisition summoned the friar’s comrades to testify about Silva. All of them confirmed the substance of Mártir’s testimony, with a few important variations. According to Mathias Pan y Agua, the above-mentioned Fleming, Silva’s interaction with his traveling mates had been more volatile and physically dangerous than Pedro Mártir let on. Pan y Agua testified,

When Fray P[edr]o asked [Silva] who was God … [Silva] responded that [God was] the Father without saying anything else; seeing this … Fray P[edr]o took out the sword of a youth [who was traveling with the group], and putting it naked against the chest of the Portuguese [man], told him that he would kill him unless he declared and confessed by the three persons of the … Holy Trinity[;] and then the Portuguese [man], as if under duress, said that God was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, (fol. 9v)

The record of Pan y Agua’s deposition (written, as was customary, in the third person) also contains information about another heated confrontation between the voyagers and their victim:

Having arrived this morning to [the] city [of Toledo] to [a] meson … and presuming this witness and the others from [Silva’s] actions [of the preceding days] that the … Portuguese [man] was a Jew, this witness [Pan y Agua] and … Fray P[edr]o took a cross that is attached to the wall of said inn and brought it to the face of [the suspect] so that he would kiss it[;] [the] Portuguese [man] not only refused to kiss it, but he stood up from the stool on which he was sitting, and fled … to the [inn’s] hall.” (fols. 9v–10r)

Friar Mártir later admitted that the altercation at the Toledan inn had indeed occurred; he also revealed that he had asked Torre to give him a dagger to threaten Silva when Silva had (allegedly) averted his face from the cross (fol. 12V).

Fernando de la Torre, the young French traveler, corroborated the main outlines of Pan y Agua’s account. Among other things, he confirmed that Silva had inquired if any Jews lived in France. Torre also claimed that Silva had asked him if Jews were at liberty to pursue their religion in that country. When Torre answered that they were, Silva allegedly said that he wanted to go to France with him. To this Torre responded that if he found out that Silva was Jewish, he would kill him, “as would any other [Frenchman] who found out that that was what he was” (fol. 11r).

Another traveler, Don Diego Manuel de Castilla, a Knight of the Order of Santiago (the most prestigious military order in Spain), concurred with the other witnesses’ suspicions that Silva was “Jewish” (a echo concepto de q el dho portugues es judio, fol. 5v). Notably, Castilla seconded his comrades’ allegations that the suspect had at first given his name as “Diego de Silva,” but had later surprised them by identifying himself as “Diego Pereira de Castro y Moscoso” (fol. 5r).

The last witness to testify about the conflict-ridden voyage was Magdalena Martinez. She was the innkeeper in whose mesón Silva/Pereira and the informers were staying at the time of the depositions. Martinez was the only one among the witnesses who claimed to have had no contact whatsoever with the suspect; by all appearances at least, she had no reason to be prejudiced against him.⁹⁵ In her testimony, Martinez merely acknowledged that three people had altercated in the patio of her inn, among them a friar who was holding a small wooden cross that had been nailed to a wall. However, Martinez said she had not investigated who the persons were and what they were arguing about (fol. 13v).

On the basis of this and the other depositions, Inquisitor Cebada and his colleagues issued an order to arrest Diego de Silva (alias Pereira). Lay assistants of the Holy Office detained the suspect in Toledo and brought him to testify before Inquisitor Joseph Paniagua (no relation to the Flemish witness) in October 17, 1661.

In his first audiencia with the Holy Tribunal the defendant identified himself not as “Diego de Silva” but as “Diego Pereira de Castro y Moscoso.” He testified that he was an hidalgo (nobleman), a soldier by profession, and a war veteran. Specifically, he claimed to have fought in the war of Portuguese independence on the Spanish side (1640), and to have attained the rank of captain in the Royal Spanish Armada in 1654. The defendant noted without shame that he was of Portuguese parentage, and provided a long and detailed personal genealogy. Among his claims were that his paternal grandfather had been an hidalgo; that three of his uncles were captains in the Spanish and Portuguese armies, two of whom were knights of the military Order of Christ; and that another uncle was a Jesuit preacher in Lisbon. To the best of his knowledge, all his forbears had been Old Christians, or as he put it, “limpios” (“clean ones,” namely persons of “clean” blood). He further claimed that none had been the subject of any inquisitorial investigation. Pereira said nothing about his supposed use of the name Silva because, surprisingly, his interrogators did not raise the matter of his alias.

When asked to give an account of his life, Pereira testified that he had spent much of his childhood in Estremoz and Borba, Portugal, but more recently had resided in various Spanish cities, including Madrid, Seville, and Cadiz.⁹⁶ From Cadiz, he explained, he had set out alone for Madrid a few days ago because he expected the king to offer him a promotion to the military Order of Christ as a reward for his latest services to the crown (fols. 22r–26r). Pereira indicated that he had started on his journey to the capital when he heard that the Order had concluded its requisite screening procedures and compiled documents known as pruebas (literally, “tests” or “proofs”). Pruebas were the means by which the military orders of Spain, as well as other exclusive Ibero-Christian societies such as religious confraternities, enforced their statutes of purity of blood. The “tests” were records of internal investigations as to the “cleanliness” of the lineage of prospective members. Such documents often contained additional information concerning the personal character and professional conduct of the applicants.⁹⁷ Pereira did not say whether the Order of Christ had determined that his family tree was sufficiently “pure,” yet he clearly anticipated that it had or would soon do so—at least that is what the content and tenor of his testimony implies (fol. 26v).

As the interrogation continued, Pereira gave rather halting responses to standard questions regarding his religious education, thereby substantiating Mártir’s claim that he (Pereira) had not been properly instructed in the Catholic faith. The defendant said that he had been baptized and confirmed in Portugal, and that he confessed his sins regularly in church. When his interrogator⁹⁸ prompted him to recite the Paternoster and Ave Maria prayers, he did so without any difficulty. Nevertheless, Pereira “stumbled considerably” when reciting the credo (dijo el credo con algunos tropezones considerables, fol. 25v). Furthermore, he “did not know the commandments of the Catholic church, or the sacraments, or the articles of the faith, or any articles of Christian doctrine” (fol. 25v).

The rest of Pereira’s testimony concerned his fateful voyage from Andalucía to Toledo. Pereira’s reconstruction of that journey contrasted sharply with that of his accusers. Regarding the alleged hiding incident, for example, the record of Pereira’s deposition reads as follows:

Realizing that he was Portuguese, the people with whom he had been traveling started to say many things to him … that he was a so-and-so, and in particular … [when] the [inn’s] hostess realized that he was Portuguese, she started to say, “Portuguese, Portuguese[!]“ and other things, to which this witness replied, “[I am] a nobleman, a very honorable one, as are all my relatives …” And they also told him many other [insulting] things, so he became angry and did not wish to eat with them.… [Another person in the group], seeing what they were telling him, started saying that [the suspect’s] mother was a Jewess, and a whore, and that his relatives were also Jews. In the same manner, while traveling on the road, they told him many things, and in particular they asked him if he was a prophet, to which he responded ironically [enchança] that yes, he was a prophet of the king of Spain (fol. 27r–27v).

Like all inquisitorial defendants, Pereira was asked if he knew or presumed why the Holy Office had arrested him. As the above citation suggests, he suspected that his erstwhile companions were the ones who had denounced him. However, Pereira chose to speculate about other possible accusers. In so doing he digressed considerably from the matter of his recent voyage. Toward the end of his deposition, Pereira went so far as to blame some Judeoconversos for his incarceration, referring to them by the popular euphemism “people of the Nation”—gente de la nación:⁹⁹

[The defendant] says he presumes that maybe some persons who are called “of the Nation,” [had denounced him to the Inquisition] … [H]e had asked [those persons] for alms at the time that he was in Cadiz, in Seville, and in Madrid…when he found himself poor and with nothing to eat. [T]hey did not want to give him [the alms] he asked for, and he treated them badly, saying that they were Jewish pícaros and that if he were one of their own they would help him, and that the reason they did not want to give him anything was that he was a nobleman, and that if they were in Portugal they would not dare to stand in front of him with their hats on. [T]hat is why he presumes that some of these persons had denounced him with false testimony, for which he may have been incarcerated [by] the Inquisition. (fol. 27V)

Engaging this spontaneous indictment of Luso-conversos, Pereira’s questioner prompted him to identify his presumed accusers by name and to explain why he had called them “Jewish pícaros.” The inquisitorial notary who assisted Inquisitor Paniagua in the case recorded Pereira’s response as follows:

In Cadiz [the defendant] begged Andrés Gómez and Manuel Díaz for alms … and [he begged] other people whom he does not remember … [yet] he remembers these two because they are very rich merchants. Andrés Gómez [is in charge of] the [Royal] Sugar Monopoly, of spice shops, and of many other things, and … Manuel Díaz is the administrator of His Majesty’s millones.¹⁰⁰ … [I]n Seville he remembers having asked [one] Dr. Messa for alms—he is a doctor—and [Messa] did not want to give him any, so [the defendant] also called [Messa] a Jew. He also remembers having begged for alms in Madrid from Antonio Henríquez, Portuguese, who is a businessman, who is of the Nation too.… [After Henríquez refused, the defendant] told him that he [meaning Henríquez] was a Jew of the [Hebrew] nation. And the same occurred with Antonio Váez de Guzmán, who [the defendant] understands is a businessman as well. (Emphasis added, fol. 27v)

Pereira’s interlocutor was not satisfied by this response. How, he asked, did Pereira know that the merchants, the doctor, and the businessman were “Jewish” if (as the questioner put it) “all the Portuguese appear to be of the same nation”? (fol. 28r). Pereira answered,

In Portugal those who are merchants are held in low esteem; there they live mistreated [ahajados] and vituperated by the rest; and that is why they move to Castile, because [in Portugal] they are not considered well-born.… [T]his [attitude] is very common in Portugal.… And since the [aforementioned individuals] are Portuguese and they have come to live in Castile, he [the defendant] called them Jews, [although] he has not seen them do anything against our holy Catholic faith. (Emphasis added; ibid.)

It was common knowledge in Portugal, Pereira continued, that merchants disliked nobles and disparaged them (fol. 29r). Furthermore, the persons in question had probably testified against him “because they had seen him outside his homeland and impoverished” (ibid.). Here Pereira’s implication was that the supposed accusers felt superior to him because of their wealth and their relative comfort in exile. In Spain, Pereira was hinting, such men could not only amass power and property, but they could do so while feeding their bloated commoners’ egos and escaping a well-deserved popular backlash.

The final portion of the Pereira dossier records the deposition of the defendant’s brother-in-law, Antonio Páez de Santi (or Sandi), a resident of Madrid and knight of the Order of Christ. It is not necessary to rehearse the details of Páez’s testimony. Suffice it to say that the information he provided concurred fully with Pereira’s declarations. The witness confirmed his prior acquaintance with the prisoner by accurately describing Pereira’s physical appearance. Crucially, Páez verified Pereira’s statements concerning the latter’s identity, his genealogy, and the purpose of his trip to Madrid. Indeed, the witness intimated that he was expecting Pereira’s arrival in the capital at the time of the arrest (fols. 36r–37v).

It is disappointing that the Pereira dossier has no formal conclusion; rather, it ends with the narrative record of Páez’s testimony. Only one document follows that record, effectively closing out the inquisitorial file. That document is a brief letter written in the defendant’s own hand and dated December 15, 1661. In the letter Pereira acknowledges receiving some personal effects, presumably the ones that the Holy Office had confiscated at the moment of his arrest. Thus it appears that, in the end, Inquisitor Paniagua and his assistants set Pereira free. Had the inquisitors realized, on the basis of Páez’s deposition, that Pereira had been a victim of libel? Unfortunately, there is no way to answer this question with certainty because the case file does not preserve any document indicating that the process against Pereira had been or would be dismissed, much less suggesting why Pereira had been released. Similarly there is no sign that the inquisitors took any steps to prosecute Mártir et alia for offering false testimony.¹⁰¹

An Analysis of the Pereira Case

Regardless of how and why the proceedings against Pereira concluded, it is clear that Páez’s deposition had brought the inquest to a crossroads. On one hand, the inquisitors had heard a series of mutually supportive and fairly consistent denunciations. Lending weight to these denunciations was the fact, made evident in the course of the inquest, that Pereira barely possessed a rudimentary knowledge of Catholic dogma and did not know several prayers. To make matters worse for the defendant, three of the denouncers were socially respectable individuals whom the inquisitors could not dismiss out of hand as ignorant and conniving rabble: Diego de Castilla was a knight of Santiago, while Pedro Mártir and Anselmo de la Huerta were religiosos in good standing. Notably, Friar Huerta was an inquisitorial calificador, a theological consultant to the Holy Office who specialized in the identification of heresy. What better qualifications than Huerta’s to produce a persuasive deposition in the eyes of his colleagues?

On the other hand stood Páez’s testimony, which entirely corroborated key portions of the suspect’s deposition. Also bolstering Pereira was his own suggestion that he had successfully undergone pruebas as an aspirant to a military honor. By deposing that he had been the subject of a genealogical investigation, Pereira flaunted his confidence that he was without sangre infecta (infected blood). More importantly, he intimated that he had the means to prove his “cleanliness” and thus, implicitly, his religious orthodoxy and good character. It is true that genealogical investigations were not foolproof because some individuals (usually wealthy ones) could purchase forged certificates of limpieza de sangre in order to obtain favorable evaluations. In any case, “clean” blood did not in itself preclude heresy from the point of view of the Holy Office. Still, pruebas were potentially among Pereira’s best defensive assets since the Inquisition could easily verify the existence of those documents and thus authenticate a significant part of his testimony.¹⁰² If in fact Pereira had submitted to the scrutiny of the Order of Christ, his pruebas could at least raise some doubts as to the credibility of his accusers. At most, the pruebas could serve as ancillary evidence of his good faith, even if such records, as fallible instruments, could not prove his limpieza or his religious self-identity in a definitive way.

Was Pereira, as his detractors claimed, a dishonest converso and a crypto-Jew? Did Pereira actually dislike cristãos-novos, as he virtually boasted to his interrogators, or was he feigning prejudice in order to avoid punishment, in this case by portraying himself as a respectably Judeophobic Old Christian?

To conclude that Pereira was a converso Judaizer who sought to trick his questioners by constructing an elaborate web of lies requires us to suppose that he was a bold and resourceful master of deception. Such an image of Pereira contrasts sharply with the one his accusers drew of him. In their rendering, Pereira was extremely clumsy and volatile: He disclosed his supposed Jewishness in fits of bitterness (“I renounce the Jewish whore who gave birth to me”) or through a rather improbable naiveté (“Don’t they say [that the second Person of the Holy Trinity] was the Son?”).

It is certainly conceivable that Pereira was a rash individual who made some outrageous statements while inebriated or out of a misguided bravado when he felt cornered by a hostile clique. All the same, Pereira’s behavior as his accusers depicted it grossly overstepped the boundaries of plausibility. For example, it would have required an inordinate and therefore unlikely carelessness or stupidity on Pereira’s part to say to a group of strangers that he was entitled to live by whatever religion suited his fancy. Seventeenth-century Spain was a country in which even the mere appearance of religious infidelity was anathema; Pereira must have known this. If he did not, or was so impulsive or demented that he could not control his heretical tongue, he certainly did not have the presence of mind to manufacture a seamless screen of falsehoods, with or without assistance of his brother-in-law.

A historical reconstruction of Pereira must reject the notion that he was at once a calculating, clever rogue and a volatile fumbler who could barely disguise his “Judaism.” Pereira could not be both astute and asinine.¹⁰³ Thus the most appropriate conclusion one can draw from the available evidence is that even if Pereira was lying about something—his identity, his past, or both—he was not the Judeophobic caricature that his detractors drew of him.¹⁰⁴

On its face, Pereira’s relative ignorance of Catholic dogma and prayer seems to buttress the accusers’ contention that he was not a bona fide Christian. As the reader will recall, Mártir’s wager was that Pereira could not bring himself to profess Christianity in public because Pereira was secretly so perverse that he denied the Catholic faith altogether.

In reality, however, all that Pereira’s ignorance suggests is that he was not a particularly pious Christian. If Pereira had been a skillful liar and a crypto-Jew, he would probably have trained himself in the tenets and verbal formulas of Christianity, for without the ability to repeat these tenets and formulas (however insincerely) he would not have been able to conceal his heresy very well, especially not while living in the midst of an arch-Catholic society such as that of seventeenth-century Spain. (By the same token, if Pereira had wanted to establish his credibility, he probably would not have told the inquisitors that he had previously undergone a genealogical investigation if had he not actually done so: Why would Pereira have risked his future and his reputation by concocting a story that his interrogators could easily disprove?)

Leaving aside questions of plausibility, we must recognize that Pereira’s lack of religious knowledge did not necessarily prove anything other than his own ignorance. The records of the Spanish Inquisition offer plentiful examples of defendants—conversos and Old Christians alike—who were far from well versed in official Catholicism. These records also attest to the fact that many self-incriminating Judaizers had not only mastered Christian prayers, but were very familiar with Christian theology.¹⁰⁵ The point is that a defendant’s ability or inability to recite creeds and prayers by rote did not necessarily have anything to do with his or her consciously chosen religious identity or, for that matter, with the inquisitors’ conclusions regarding that defendant’s real or alleged attitude towards Catholicism.

It may well be that Pereira told his questioners the truth about himself. Yet, given the absence of definitive proof to that effect, the riddle of his “true” religious identity and his ethnic origin remains irresolvable. What interests us here, however, is not the informants’ credibility, but the substance of their testimony as an example of anti-converso sentiment.

Through their depositions, the defendant and his denouncers voiced a gamut of derisive preconceptions about New Christians that were widespread in the Iberia of the 1600s, as Pereira’s own observations about his homeland suggest. All of the informants, including the accused, appealed first and foremost to an anti-Portuguese variant of conversophobia, itself a form of Judeophobia, in order to place blame on conversos (real or imagined) and paint themselves in the colors of innocence and righteousness.

Pedro Mártir and his comrades articulated a rather crude Judeophobia through a kind of semantic slippage. Instead of defining Pereira as a New Christian heretic, the accusers referred to him almost obsessively as el Portugués occasionally shifting to anti-Jewish epithets such as perro judio (Jewish dog). In so doing they not only (mis)used the term “Portuguese” to mean “converso” and revealed their Judeophobic intent, but they tacitly conveyed that they were not interested in denouncing heresy in the strictest sense. In fact, none of the accusers employed such designations as hereje (heretic) and judaizante at all. Instead, the informants insinuated that the person they were accusing was a full-fledged Portuguese “Jew” who had disguised himself as a Christian. The focus here was not on the suspect’s religious behavior, but on his presumed nature: In the accusers’ eyes it was as if Pereira were ultimately not a Christian who behaved as a Jew, namely a Judaizer, but a wholly foreign and unassimilable creature whose essential character was “Jewish.” It is noteworthy that Friars Huerta and Mártir were educated men whose theological training could have allowed them to define Pereira in much more nuanced—and much more accurate—terms.

Interestingly, Pereira pursued the same anti-“Portuguese” logic as his accusers. This is highly ironic in light of the fact that Pereira was Portuguese himself. By his own account, Pereira had previously assailed five supposed Judeoconversos based on the same prejudiced view of Portuguese immigrants that had, according to him, driven Mártir and the other travelers to mistrust, curse, and assault him. Specifically, Pereira said that when he had been a resident of Cadiz, Seville, and Madrid, he had accused two merchants, a doctor, and a businessman of being “Jewish pícaros” merely because they, like himself, were Portuguese who happened to be living in Spain. The defendant even admitted that he had insulted the men although he possessed no evidence that they were Judaizers (one suspects Pereira did not even have any proof that his alleged victimizers were New Christians, let alone crypto-Jews). In short, the defendant admitted he had drawn the imaginary equation Portuguese = converso = secret Jew, to which he had fallen prey while traveling from Andalusia to Castile.

In contrast to the travelers’ portrait of Pereira, however, Pereira’s depiction of the five supposed Luso-conversos reflected a social or class bias as much as it expressed a sense of ethnic and religious opposition between Old and New Christians. The suspect explained that in insulting the alleged cristãos-novos he had upheld a popular notion that being bourgeois was tantamount to being of Jewish extraction, or at least was as reprehensible as being Jewish. Whether Pereira truly espoused this notion or had merely seized it as a convenient tool with which to level verbal abuse is not immediately relevant. What is more interesting is the mental association that Pereira claimed to have made between members of urban non-noble elites—businessmen, merchants, and professionals—on one hand, and stereotyped images of “Judaic” ignobility on the other.

Pereira’s imaginary association entailed four mutually reinforcing premises. The first premise was that a good Christian (by implication, a person of “clean” blood such as Pereira himself) could easily deduce that a given individual was a New Christian, and therefore a Jew, simply by ascertaining that the person was a merchant or businessman of some kind. The second premise was that merchants, and by extension businessmen in general, were easily identifiable by their social behavior, for example by the rudeness with which they treated honorable people. The third premise held, along the same lines, that a Portuguese merchant who acted contemptuously toward his (or presumably her) betters either had Jewish blood or was like someone who did. Conversely—and this was the fourth premise—having Jewish blood pre-disposed a person to offend the natural and proper order of society by withholding reverence where reverence was due and by embracing beliefs that were contrary to Catholicism. It is significant that Pereira did not pay any attention to the religious beliefs of his alleged libelers, as if to say that the heretical nature of Luso-conversos was well known.

To summarize, Pereira not only presented himself as a Judeophobe, but as an indigent aristocrat who resented low-born individuals (in this case, conversos) precisely because their power over him, like their material wealth, accrued not from the dignity of noble lineage but from the exercise of base commercial or professional skills. Where Mártir and the travelers had collapsed ethnic and religious categories in their testimony (“Portuguese” = “converso” = “Jew”), Pereira conflated two distinct religious classifications (“Jew” and “heretic”), an ethnic classification (“Portuguese of the Nation”), and a socioeconomic one (“businessman” and/or “merchant”).¹⁰⁶

Judeophobia and the Place of Conversos in Peninsular Society

What does the testimony collected in the Pereira dossier tell us about the historical environment from which it sprang? What does the informants’ narrative conflation of religious, ethnic, and in Pereira’s case, socioeconomic categories reveal about the ways in which Old Christians tended to regard conversos in the seventeenth century?

Above all, the Pereira dossier bears witness to an atmosphere of suspicion that had the potential to mushroom into open animosity against Judeoconversos, particularly against those of Portuguese origin. That such hostility exploded in the face of Diego Pereira, whose outward behavior was probably beyond serious reproach, suggests the fact that at least some bigoted Spaniards (and a few Catholic foreigners like Torre and Pan y Agua) did not require any real evidence of heresy in order to “unmask” and persecute “secret Jews.” Pereira confirmed this fact when he indicated that he had not bothered to avail himself of any actual evidence of Judaizing to conclude that certain Portuguese men were contemptible “Jews.” All that the accusers’ passive bigotry required for it to turn into open abuse was a perception that its object was “Portuguese.”

The view that Portuguese immigrants and their descendants were ipso facto New Christians, and that all conversos of Lusitanian origin were secret Jews, arose in Spain in response to the Portuguese migrations of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Like most sweeping, derisive generalizations, this double presumption was empirically untenable. Even so, it was not a mere product of bigoted hallucination; rather, it sprang from a small but significant kernel of historical actuality.

As several historians have noted, there is evidence that crypto-Judaism was a lingering reality among Portuguese conversos long after Spanish Judaizing had withered under the cumulative impact of Inquisitorial persecution.¹⁰⁷ Many of the immigrants to Spain were indeed conversos, but, more importantly, it is probable that a number of them were also secret Jews.

Lusitanian crypto-Judaism, whatever its objective resemblance to normative Judaism, owed its survival to the conditions under which Jewish and converso life developed in Portugal. The scope of this study prohibits a thorough review of these conditions, yet the following important aspects are worth mentioning.

The Jews of Portugal pursued a separate social and religious existence in relative peace until 1497. In that year, King Manoel arranged for summary mass baptisms by which an overwhelming majority of them became titular Christians. Once baptized, the former Jews enjoyed legal protection from discrimination and persecution for a period of thirty-six years, in accordance with consecutive royal decrees. The explicit purpose of such protection was to permit the unhindered assimilation of all first-generation “conversos” (the children of the converts) and to avert the need to establish an Inquisition in the Spanish mold.¹⁰⁸

Some scholars have argued that a vast majority of Luso-conversos took advantage of the long legal reprieve to acculturate into Portuguese Christian society.¹⁰⁹ It is certainly the case that some families of cristãos-novos penetrated the upper echelons of the Portuguese nobility, the royal bureaucracy, and the financial and commercial elite of the Portuguese kingdom from 1497 until the establishment of the Lusitanian Inquisition in 1536.¹¹⁰ Still, it is not clear what proportion of Luso-conversos embraced Catholicism sincerely. Some data suggest the possibility that internal converso resistance to Christianization was considerable. For example, the first generations of cristãos-novos included several Spanish Jews who had successfully defied conversionist pressure in their native land, and had taken refuge in Portugal in 1492. That those tenacious refugees had not capitulated earlier, under the threat of banishment and expropriation, makes it improbable that they embraced Catholicism wholeheartedly after the sudden and utterly perfunctory mass conversion of 1497.

Perhaps the most prudent assertion one can make about the situation in Portugal prior to 1536, then, is that royal protection allowed those converts who wanted to preserve their Jewish attachments to cultivate and bequeath them in secret, while it also allowed those converts who wished to blend into the fabric of Christendom to pursue the path of assimilation in relative peace.

Sincerely Christian or not, Portuguese conversos became culturally “Ibericized” in the course of the sixteenth century, just as Spanish New Christians had before them. Externally at least, nothing distinguished New Christians from Old Christians in Portugal by the seventeenth century. Portuguese conversos were unique, however, in that their existence, unlike that of the Spanish cristianos nuevos, was not the result of a long period of persecution. A key difference between the Spanish and Portuguese Jewries is that the former disintegrated slowly, acrimoniously, and often as a direct consequence of Judeophobic violence, while the latter did not.¹¹¹ Portuguese Jewry as a whole ceased to exist in an instant, and only by the most superficial and pragmatic of official acts. Despite episodes of brutality and discrimination, Portuguese Jews suffered nothing comparable to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 that gave rise to the converso problem in Castile and Aragon.¹¹² Furthermore, unlike their Spanish counterparts, Portuguese Jews did not have to endure furious waves of conversionist and Judeophobic propaganda. In Portugal there was never any possibility of friction between the converted and the unconverted, as occurred in Spain, since baptism had swept up all the Lusitanian kehillot.¹¹³ Crucially, in Portugal most of the converted did not come under inquisitorial scrutiny, though that sorry fate would befall their descendants.

For these reasons, the former Jews of Portugal were able to retain a measure of internal cohesiveness and a sense of continuity with the (Jewish) past. If nothing else, certain group instincts passed by inertia from one generation of Luso-conversos to the next. As late as the seventeenth century, Portuguese conversos still tended to maintain their intracommunal bonds by pursuing endogamous marriage alliances and cultivating tightly knit commercial and professional relationships.¹¹⁴ In many cases, the familial and commercial networks formed by these bonds resembled or even continued ones that existed among Portuguese Jews prior to 1497. Additionally, cristãos-novos inherited many of the professional roles of their Jewish predecessors and thus much of the Jews’ social and political position in Portuguese society.¹¹⁵ When dealing with external authorities, Lusitanian conversos often behaved as a community, and the authorities treated them accordingly. This happened, for example, when conversos pooled together enormous sums of money and solicited João III and the pope through semiofficial representatives in a failed attempt to prevent the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition.¹¹⁶ Such communal patterns of activity would be repeated later, for example in the above-mentioned negotiations with Philip II of Spain.

Again, the probability is high that many if not most Luso-conversos retained a consciousness of belonging to an identifiable social group quite distinct from the Ibero-Christian mainstream. Many cristãos-novos developed a sense of ethnic difference.¹¹⁷ This group consciousness probably had roots in an awareness of common descent, and likely derived sustenance from circumstantial factors. Among these factors were continual social and economic intercourse among cristãos-novos, as well as the persistence of Old Christian prejudice against conversos irrespective of the latter’s religious convictions.

The entry of a sizable “Portuguese” element into the Spanish scene after 1580 was a watershed in the history of all peninsular conversos. By that time, the virtual disappearance of native crypto-Judaism had caused a shift in Spanish attitudes toward cristianos nuevos. Rather than focusing on religious behavior per se, these attitudes now focused on the purported ethnic or racial characteristics of Judeoconversos. So too, words like converso, which had applied to actual converts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had become hereditary labels with predominantly racial or ethnic meanings. The emergence of collective designations such as gente del linaje (people of the lineage), esta raza (this race), esta casta (this caste), esta nación (this nation), and gente de la nación (people of the Nation), underlined the perceptual turn toward racialism that took place in Castile and Aragon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹¹⁸

Once in Spain, Portuguese conversos presented a challenge to the conversophobic imagination because they revived the specter of widespread heresy at a time when racial criteria had become central in Spanish thinking about human difference and social danger. Not long after the arrival of thousands of Luso-conversos, terms such as portugueses de la nación—or simply, portugueses—came into popular use as a means of differentiating between Spanish conversos and those of foreign provenance. A practical effect of the new code words was to define Portuguese New Christians as a dangerous group in their own right. In time, the appellation “Portuguese” acquired the same cross-generational meaning that the term converso had attained at the turn of the sixteenth century: by the 1600s, Spaniards typically employed the word “Portuguese” to identify New Christians who were descended from Portuguese immigrants. The difference was that the designation “Portuguese” connoted a particularly grave religious menace as much as it connoted a purely racial one.

One result of these developments is the conceptual muddle exemplified by the narrative testimony of the informants in the Pereira investigation. The various instances of semantic slippage in that case do not suggest the relatively unambiguous trend toward racial or ethnic definitions of “otherness” that had taken place during the sixteenth century, but a chaotic ideational landscape in which several ethnic, racial, religious, and economic conceptions of conversos’ “otherness” combined in common parlance to articulate the paranoid anxieties of a rather bewildered Spanish public. It was a landscape born of the Portuguese influx and the perceptual challenge that the influx posed, namely, how to understand, define, and identify the new converso danger.

Pereira’s own avowed dislike of wealthy merchants is an example of a widespread type of anxiety concerning the roles that conversos played—and were thought to play—in the economic life of Spain and Portugal. In both countries there were small numbers of conversos who occupied prominent positions in commerce and high finance. This is one reason that a stereotype developed of conversos as powerful and rapacious “businessmen.” The Portuguese term homens de negocios, its Spanish equivalent, hombres de negocios and the bilingual term mercaderes gave linguistic expression to this stereotype. By the early 1600s, those terms, like the more generic hombres de la nation (men of the Nation) had become popular euphemisms for conversos.

Modern scholars have tended to regard New Christians as a predominantly urban merchant bourgeoisie.¹¹⁹ On the whole, this generalization is probably accurate given the high proportion of conversos who were city-bound traffickers and retailers. It would skew the record, however, to ignore the fact that conversos also took part in such occupations as soldiering, farming, cattle raising, domestic service, and manual labor, not to mention medicine, bureaucratic administration, tax collection, and diplomacy—four traditionally “Jewish” occupations that did not involve the buying and selling of material commodities.¹²⁰ A few conversos even became clerics as late as the seventeenth century, despite repeated inquisitorial purges and the fact that “purity of blood” had become a legal requisite for entering religious orders and for assuming many ecclesiastical posts.¹²¹

Within the substratum of New Christian comerciantes¹²² itself there was substantial diversity. From penurious street vendors, to petty shopkeepers, artisans and seamstresses, to relatively comfortable arrendadores, it is clear that converso businessmen and merchants did not comprise a homogeneous group. In the world of these conversos, the word negocios (“business”—literally, “affairs” or “deals”) actually pointed to a variety of mercantile and sometimes non-mercantile activities. As Pilar Huerga Criado has observed, the purview of a single converso businessman could in fact be very broad: “The field in which converso businessmen developed their negocios extended to all economic sectors: Agricultural, artisanal, mercantile, and financial. One who exploited the land, also trafficked in cattle and wine, sold and bought cloths, and administered some rent.”¹²³ Many a New Christian described himself (less often herself) as a mercader (or comerciante) de todos géneros—literally a “merchant of all genres of merchandise.”¹²⁴ Somewhat reminiscent of the colloquial English term “jack of all trades,” this designation underscores the versatility that such individuals developed in order to survive within a variegated economic environment. The point is that New Christians did not form a monolithic class of capitalists or an undifferentiated bourgeoisie. Rather, they were a dynamic and well-integrated part of the Iberian economy whose activities in various fields, many if not most of them commercial, reflected the multifarious nature of that economy.

To be sure, in a country as import-dependent as Spain was during the 1600’s, it was only logical that merchants—including those of New Christian stock—were visible mainstays of economic life. In the cities, foreign traders (as well as native traders with foreign connections) were usually the ones who supplied indigenous artisans with raw materials and made foreign manufactures widely available to a commodity-hungry public. Wholesalers met local demand for imports such as tobacco and inexpensive fabrics at local plazas and fairs, while petty tradesmen (many of them smugglers) sold all manner of trinkets, toilet accessories, and trumpery in the streets.¹²⁵

With regard to the economic and ethnic stratification of Spain’s predominantly foreign merchant class, Antonio Dominguez Ortiz has noted,

Between [the] magnates and the miserable buhoneros [sellers of bauble] who traversed the dusty roads of Castile there was a whole gamut of intermediate levels in which we can discern a certain specialization by national origin; usually, wholesale commerce was in the hands of [immigrant] Italians and Flemings, while Portuguese and Frenchmen … were more numerous in medium and small commerce. But exceptions were so numerous that we think it preferable to abstain from generalizations of that nature.¹²⁶

Converso merchants, including those of Lusitanian origin, tended to dwell within the low and intermediate regions of the commercial sector that Dominguez associates with Portuguese and Frenchmen (in fact, it is conceivable that by “Portuguese” Dominguez actually meant Portuguese Judeoconversos). Again, a handful of Portuguese conversos and their Spanish descendants did belong to the upper economic strata. As royal financiers, administrators, and asentistas (royal contractors), wealthy cristãos-novos reached the peak of their influence during the reign of Philip IV.¹²⁷ To appreciate how important some of these hombres de negocios were to the crown, suffice it to note that a mere six years after Philip’s accession to the throne—well before Portuguese conversos became his financial backers of choice—ten of them lent the state a total of nearly 1.9 million ducats. That sum represented an imposing 39 percent of the crown’s yearly foreign budget.¹²⁸ Great financiers and asentistas, however, were not typical of Judeoconverso businessmen, who usually took part in relatively minor trades and associated occupations.

Members of the Bernal de Caño family of Ciudad Rodrigo are examples of a middling yet relatively prosperous type of converso merchant. The Caños descended from agricultural laborers who had emigrated from Portugal at the end of the sixteenth century. In Spain, the men of the family became specialists in trades that conformed to the mixed economy of their town. For instance, Juan Bernal purchased wine and cattle from local growers and ranchers in his role as a supplier of taverns and butcher shops in Ciudad Rodrigo. In addition, he served as an arrendador of lay and ecclesiastical rents.¹²⁹ So too, we find members of the immigrant Pinero family of Ciudad Rodrigo who dealt in textiles, as their immediate ancestors had done in Portugal, yet combined that “traditional” trade with farming, cattle-raising, and rent collection in their adopted country.¹³⁰

Further down the socioeconomic ladder, a host of Portuguese conversos, perhaps a plurality, specialized in what one may vaguely call petty commerce. In reality, these simple mercaderes engaged in types of business as diverse but less remunerative than those pursued by the likes of the Bernal Caños and the Piñeros. For example, a converso “stall-keeper” was often also the one who “manufactured” or at least prepared the products he or she sold, such as aguardiente (a type of homemade liquor). Like their more prosperous fellows, struggling converso traders congregated in the marketplaces of Madrid, Seville, and other cities to buy and sell food, manufactures, and services.

Many immigrant conversos made a living exclusively by selling items of foreign provenance, either by offering the merchandise from door to door, or by tending a small estanco (a small, semipermanent shop or stall) supplied by friends or relatives who brought the merchandise from distant parts. For instance, the small family of Simon Fernández, a Portuguese immigrant, lived almost solely by the petty linen trade in Madrid.¹³¹ Simon and his two eldest sons worked as itinerant linen salesmen. His daughter Isabel was married to another lenzero (seller of linens) of Portuguese extraction. Only Simon’s brother-in-law, who owned a shop in Madrid’s bustling Calle Mayor, sold miscellaneous items, including semiprecious objects made from a type of processed American silver called solimán. Despite counting on the stability of this estanco the extended Fernández family was not wealthy. Simon’s in-laws were totally destitute and “lived from alms” according to Manuel, Simon’s second son.¹³² Like his father, Manuel had himself had to fend off penury virtually his entire life: He had sold linens in the streets of Madrid well before reaching the age of ten.¹³³

New Christians like Simon Fernández, who settled in Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took advantage of the centrality of the capital and of the sheer volume of goods and services that were exchanged there. Not surprisingly, the records of the Toledan tribunal of the Inquisition, which encompassed Madrid, contain a host of cases against “Portuguese” lenzeros, estanqueros de tabaco (tobacco stand-keepers), and vendedores de paños (sellers of woven fabrics, usually inexpensive, imported wool).¹³⁴ The abundance of such cases gives the strong impression that immigrant conversos were especially numerous in textiles, tobacco, chocolate, and other portable, high-demand commodities. The areas of central Madrid in which Simon Fernández and his sons sold linens, namely the marketplaces and residential streets surrounding the Calle Mayor, seem to have developed something of a “foreign” air with the mass immigration of Judeconversos from Lusitania after 1580, as well as other extranjeros (foreigners) throughout the seventeenth century. It is nonetheless unclear whether any areas of the city developed as specifically “Portuguese” sectors.¹³⁵

A possible reason that it is not easy to find such sectors is that relatively few converso merchants stayed in one place along the course of their commercial careers. Economically and geographically, Spain’s New Christian minority as a whole was extremely mobile. In that respect, Judeoconversos differed from a majority of Old Christians and resembled a multitude of foreigners, chiefly Flemings, Frenchmen, and Italians, who flocked to Spain throughout the seventeenth century, attracted by the prospect of commerce in American and European imports. Of course, a key distinction between these foreigners and the conversos was that the latter were a very familiar part of the socioeconomic landscape of Iberia. By the seventeenth century, most Peninsular conversos were thoroughly Ibericized, that is to say, they were culturally (if not religiously) “Spanish” or “Portuguese.” Their language, public behavior, tastes, and social mores were in line with those of Old Christians of various social classes.¹³⁶

One advantage that cristianos nuevos (Portuguese and non-Portuguese alike) had over the immigrant foreigners was that they could avail themselves of preexisting networks of fellow conversos whose presence and support throughout the peninsula made commerce in portable goods an attractive and potentially profitable pursuit. Of course, conversos also differed from the foreigners in that they bore an old social stigma and were often legally disabled by reason of their Jewish ancestry.

Conversos in general, and especially the “Portuguese of the Nation,” became the objects of a popular backlash against foreigners as alarm over the political and economic crisis of the Habsburg kingdom grew during the seventeenth century. The backlash manifested itself in various arenas.

Among the educated, eminent social critics struck a xenophobic chord when they bemoaned the fact that immigrant businessmen had become the country’s de facto mercantile and entrepreneurial class. Some commentators were particularly distressed that religiously suspect foreigners such as Frenchmen (possible Calvinists) and Portuguese New Christians (presumed Judaizers) prospered, while native Catholics wallowed in debt. Along these lines, the commentator Tomas de Mercado denounced what he called “our senseless subjection to foreigners in giving them control of all the most important things in the country…. The best properties are theirs … [and] the bulk of the kingdom [is] in their hands.”¹³⁷ The mercantilist Sancho de Moncada was more specific. For him, the ills of Spain derived from “the new trade of foreigners,” the radical cure for which was to prohibit foreign manufactures altogether.¹³⁸ Invective against Luso-converso businessmen flowed with particular venom from the pens of various commentators. One polemicist wrote to Philip IV that, “being lords of commerce and of the [customs] of all the ports … through the arrendamientos of royal rents, all [conversos] have their wealth outside of [the Habsburg Kingdoms] and the greater part of it in the provinces of your enemies … and they bleed these [Hispanic] realms continually, weakening them more every day, and making your enemies more powerful.”¹³⁹ Such condemnation grossly exaggerated the power of aliens and glossed over the obvious fact that most immigrants were not merchant tycoons. It is true that foreign businessmen had attained prominence in economic life. Frenchmen and Flemings, for example, founded large trading houses in Seville. Genoese bankers, the German Fuggers, and wealthy Portuguese conversos bankrolled the Spanish state at high interest. As mentioned earlier, a few of these conversos also secured the lucrative royal contracts.¹⁴⁰ For all their ire, however, nativist reactionaries could not erase the fact that the commercial activities of the immigrants satisfied Spanish demand that native businessmen and capitalists could not meet, be it demand for credit, administrative services, or foreign goods.

At a popular level, the attitudes of Old Christians toward converso merchants and businessmen during Spain’s century of crisis were often tinted by a host of fears about the latter’s supposed greed, deceitfulness, and general immorality. Some libelous fictions that circulated freely as late as the 1700s had obvious roots in the mythological repertoire of medieval Judeophobia,¹⁴¹ and had little if anything to do directly with the economic activities of seventeenth-century conversos. For example, in the 1630s a royal bureaucrat by the name of Juan de Quinones devoted a purportedly scientific treatise to the subject of Jewish male menstruation. Quinones argued not only that Jewish men and their male descendants menstruated, but that all who descended of Jews emitted a peculiar odor, that they drank Christian blood to alleviate their God-given maladies, and so on.¹⁴² Quinones’s fabulous claims were centuries old,¹⁴³ yet they proved remarkably resilient despite the fact that there had been no openly professing Jews in Iberia since the 1490s.

One of the most successful propagators of mythic conversophobia was the Portuguese polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos. His Breve discurso contra a herética perfidia do Iudaismo (1622) was replete with Judeophobic folklore, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the work sold well both in Costa Mattos’s homeland and in Spain.¹⁴⁴ The Spaniard Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s oft-cited Centinela contra Judios, which dated from the early 1670s, rehearsed the same gamut of anti-Jewish legends for a Spanish public not yet weary of reading about Jews and the evil inclinations and physical monstrosities they supposedly transmitted to their descendants.¹⁴⁵

Given the currency of conversophobic myths in the Spain of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV, it does not seem coincidental that a major outburst of anti-converso hatred occurred in 1632, when a libel known as the Cristo de la Paciencia spread throughout Madrid. This cause célèbre centered on a group of Portuguese conversos whom local inquisitors had accused of ritually flogging an effigy of Christ in their “secret synagogue.”¹⁴⁶ The inquest into the supposed crimes culminated in a monumental auto general de fe in which two of the accused received sentences of death, to the vocal delight of thousands of onlookers.¹⁴⁷

The image of conversos as bloodthirsty sadists clearly had a wide and lasting appeal. Shortly after the Paciencia scandal subsided, another celebrated Judeophobic libel became the subject of a popular literary revival. The libel in question was the late medieval legend of the Holy Child of La Guardia (1492), a gory tale of Eucharist desecration and the ritual murder of a Christlike child by Spanish Jews and conversos. Among latter-day dramatizers of this story were the playwrights Jose de Cañizárez (La viva imagen de Cristo, 1641), and the undisputed bestseller of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, Lope de Vega (El niño inocente, 1640).¹⁴⁸ For its part, the accusation that conversos relived their ancestors’ deicidal bloodlust by whipping statues of Christ resurfaced as late as 1650, in the inquisitorial process against Maria de Sierra.¹⁴⁹

By itself, the recurrence of old defamations suggests that Judeophobic images had enormous resonance both as narrative motifs and as accusatory devices to be wielded against conversos. However, during the late 1500s and throughout the 1600s anti-converso sentiment was much more than a perpetuation of medieval hatreds; it was also a product of the specific historical circumstances in which it occurred. Seventeenth-century conversophobia was similar, often identical in form to medieval Judeophobia, yet the meanings that the latter-day bigots attached to their fantasies were not necessarily the same as those the medieval Jew-baiters attached to theirs.

Seventeenth-century Portuguese and especially Spanish conversophobia adhered closely to the essentialist ideology (or ideologies) of pureza de sangre. It is not by chance that vociferous defenders of that ideology were at the forefront of anti-converso agitation. In numerous essays, virtually all of them depicted Judeoconversos as greedy, socially ambitious parasites with a hereditary proclivity toward unproductive occupations, such as commodity trading, administration, and (ironically enough) writing. Torrejoncillo, for example, contended that many conversos did not work on the land and were drawn toward commerce and pen-wielding because they descended from the Israelite tribe of Reuben, which God had cursed in such a way that whatever its progeny planted on good soil died within a few days.¹⁵⁰ In 1633, Juan Escobar de Corro provided what could easily pass for a “digest” of common misgivings about conversos when he wrote, “Hebraei et … eorum descendentes abjecti et infames ab omnibus reputantur. Et sunt … seditosi, cupidi, avari et perniciosi ad comunitates.…”¹⁵¹ Unfortunately for conversos, such pejorative evaluations were not the preserve of polemicists. Similar derogations issued from places far removed from debates concerning the purity of blood statutes. In popular literature, for instance, the collective image of conversos did not fare particularly well. Miguel de Cervantes had one of his characters in El Coloquio de los Perros exclaim the following:

It is with wonder that one can find among [conversos] one who believes in the sacred Catholic faith in a straightforward manner: their sole intent is to grasp and save money.… [A]lways earning and never spending, they…gather up the greatest quantity of money that there is in Spain…. They get it all, they hide it all, and they swallow it all. Let it be considered that they are many, and that each day they hide a little or a lot…. They steal from us with stealth [a pie quedo], and they do so with the fruits of our own inheritance, which they resell to us, becoming rich and leaving us poor…. [T]heir science is none other than stealing from us, and they practice it effortlessly.¹⁵²

According to depictions such as the above, conversos despised honest, productive labor. What is more, they were physically weak and incapable of exhibiting valor; thus (among other reasons) they could never equal the honor of hidalgos—or, for that matter, that of Old Christian commoners, who enjoyed the comparable dignity of working on the land. Conversos were unworthy, the argument went, regardless of how successful they were in purchasing offices and titles, and in sporting all the external trappings of social success—fine dress, good manners, and the like.¹⁵³