Читать книгу A History of the Inquisition of Spain (Vol. 1-4) - Henry Charles Lea - Страница 7

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TO appreciate properly the position of the Jews in Spain, it is requisite first to understand the light in which they were regarded elsewhere throughout Christendom during the medieval period. It has already been seen that the Church held the Jew to be a being deprived, by the guilt of his ancestors, of all natural rights save that of existence. The privileges accorded to the Jews and the social equality to which they were admitted under the Carlovingians provoked the severest animadversions of the churchmen.[239] About 890, Stephen VI writes to the Archbishop of Narbonne that he has heard with mortal anxiety that these enemies of God are allowed to hold land and that Christians dealt with these dogs and even rendered service to them.[240] It is true that Alexander III maintained the ancient rule that they could repair their existing synagogues but not build new ones, and Clement III honored himself by one of the rare human utterances in their favor, prohibiting their forced conversion, their murder or wounding or spoliation, their deprivation of religious observances, the exaction of forced service unless such was customary, or the violation of their cemeteries in search of treasure, and, moreover, both of these decrees were embodied by Gregory IX in the canon law.[241] Yet these prohibitions only point out to us the manner in which popular zeal applied the principles enunciated by the Church and, when the council of Paris, in 1212, forbade, under pain of excommunication, Christian midwives to attend a Jewess in labor, it shows that they were authoritatively regarded as less entitled than beasts to human sympathy.[242]

How popular hostility was aroused and strengthened is illustrated in a letter addressed, in 1208, by Innocent III to the Count of Nevers. Although, he says, the Jews, against whom the blood of Jesus Christ cries aloud, are not to be slain, lest Christians should forget the divine law, yet are they to be scattered as wanderers over the earth, that their faces may be filled with ignominy and they may seek the name of Jesus Christ. Blasphemers of the Christian name are not to be cherished by princes, in oppression of the servants of the Lord, but are rather to be repressed with servitude, of which they rendered themselves worthy when they laid sacrilegious hands on Him, who had come to give them true freedom, and they cried that His blood should be upon them and their children. Yet when prelates and priests intervene to crush their malice, they laugh at excommunication and nobles are found who protect them. The Count of Nevers is said to be a defender of the Jews; if he does not dread the divine wrath, Innocent threatens to lay hands on him and punish his disobedience.[243] The Cistercian Cæsarius of Heisterbach, in his dialogues for the moral instruction of his fellow monks, tells several stories which illustrate the utter contempt felt for the feelings and rights of Jews, and in one of them there is an allusion to the curious popular belief that the Jews had a vile odor, which they lost in baptism—a belief prolonged, at least in Spain, until the seventeenth century was well advanced.[244] Even so enlightened a prelate as Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in 1416, reproves the sovereigns of Christendom for their liberality towards the Jews, which he can attribute only to the vile love of gain; if Jews are allowed to remain, it should be only as servants to Christians.[245] General prohibitions of maltreatment availed little when prelate and priest were busy in inflaming popular aversion and popes were found to threaten any prince hardy enough to interpose and protect the unfortunate race.

MEDIEVAL PERSECUTION

Of course under such impulsion there was scant ceremony in dealing with these outcasts in any way that religious ardor might suggest. When, in 1009, the Saracens captured Jerusalem and destroyed the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the rage and indignation of Europe assumed so threatening a form that multitudes of Jews took refuge in baptism.[246] When religious exaltation culminated in the Crusades, it seemed to those who assumed the cross a folly to redeem Palestine while leaving behind the impious race that had crucified the Lord, and everywhere, in 1096, the assembling of crusaders was the signal for Jewish massacre. It would be superfluous to recount in detail the dreary catalogue of wholesale slaughters which for centuries disgraced Europe, whenever fanaticism or the disappearance of a child gave rise to stories of the murder rite, or a blood-stained host suggested sacrilege committed on the sacrament, or some passing evil, such as an epidemic, aroused the populace to bloodshed and rapine. The medieval chronicles are full of such terrible scenes, in which cruelty and greed assumed the cloak of zeal to avenge God; and when, in rare instances, the authorities protected the defenceless, it was ascribed to unworthy motives, as in the case of Johann von Kraichbau, Bishop of Speyer, who, in 1096, not only saved some Jews but beheaded their assailants and was accused of being heavily bribed; nor did Frederic Barbarossa and Ludwig of Bavaria escape similar imputations.[247] It was safer and more profitable to combine piety and plunder as when, in April, 1182, Philip Augustus ordered all Jews to leave France by St. John’s day, confiscating their landed property and allowing them to take their personal effects. His grandson, the saintly Louis, resorted without scruple to replenishing his treasury by ransoming the Jews and the latter’s grandson, Philippe le Bel, was still more unscrupulous in 1306, when, by a concerted movement, he seized all the Jews in his dominions, stripped them of property, and banished them under pain of death. In England King John, in 1210, cast Jews into prison and tortured them for ransom, and his grandson, Edward I, followed the example of Philip Augustus so effectually that Jews were not allowed to return until the time of Cromwell.[248]

Spain remained so long isolated from the movements which agitated the rest of Christendom that the abhorrence for the Jew, taught by the Church and reduced to practice in so many ways by the people, was late in development. In the deluge of the Saracen conquest and in the fierce struggles of the early Reconquest, the antipathy so savagely expressed in the Gothic legislation seemed to pass away, possibly because there could have been but few Jews among the rude mountaineers of Galicia and Asturias. It is true that the Wisigothic laws, in the Romance version known as the Fuero Juzgo, remained nominally in force; it is also true that a law was interpolated in the Fuero, which seems to indicate a sudden recrudescence of fanaticism after a long interval of comparative toleration. It provides that if a Jew loyally embraces the faith of Christ, he shall have license to trade in all things with Christians, but if he subsequently relapses into Judaism his person and property are forfeit to the king; Jews persisting in their faith shall not consort with Christians, but may trade with each other and pay taxes to the king. Their houses and slaves and lands and orchards and vineyards, which they may have bought from Christians, even though the purchase be of old date, are declared confiscated to the king, who may bestow them on whom he pleases. If any Jew trades in violation of this law he shall become a slave of the king, with all his property. Christians shall not trade with Jews; if a noble does so, he shall forfeit three pounds of gold to the king; on transactions of more than two pounds, the excess is forfeit to the king, together with three doblas; if the offender is a commoner, he shall receive three hundred lashes.[249]

CONDITION OF SPANISH JEWS

The date of this law is uncertain, but it presupposes a considerable anterior period of toleration, during which Jews had multiplied and had become possessed of landed wealth. To what extent it may have been enforced we have no means of knowing, but its observance must only have been temporary, for such glimpses as we get of the condition of the Jews up to the fourteenth century are wholly incompatible with the fierce proscription of the Gothic laws. As the Spanish kingdoms organized themselves, the Fuero Juzgo for the most part was superseded by a crowd of local fueros, cartas-pueblas and customs defining the franchises of each community, and we have seen in the preceding chapter how in these both Moor and Jew were recognized as sharing in the common rights of citizenship and how fully the freedom of trade between all classes was permitted. In 1251 the Fuero Juzgo was formally abrogated in Aragon by Jaime I, who forbade it to be cited in the courts—a measure which infers that it had practically become obsolete.[250] In Castile it lingered somewhat longer and traces of its existence are to be found in some places until the end of the thirteenth century.[251] These, however, are not to be construed as referring to the provisions respecting Jews, which had long been superseded.

In fact, the Jews formed too large and important a portion of the population to be treated without consideration. The sovereigns, involved permanently in struggles with the Saracen and with mutinous nobles, found it necessary to utilize all the resources at their command, whether in money, intelligence, or military service. In the first two of these the Jews stood pre-eminent, nor were they remiss in the latter. On the disastrous field of Zalaca, in 1086, forty thousand Jews are said to have followed the banner of Alfonso VI, and the slaughter they endured proved their devotion, while, at the defeat of Ucles in 1108, they composed nearly the whole left wing of the Castilian host.[252] In 1285 we hear of Jews and Moors aiding the Aragonese in their assaults on the retreating forces of Philippe le Hardi.[253] As regards money, the traffic and finance of Spain were largely in their hands, and they furnished, with the Moors, the readiest source from which to derive revenue. Every male who had married, or who had reached the age of 20, paid an annual poll tax of three gold maravedís; there were also a number of imposts peculiar to them, and, in addition, they shared with the rest of the population in the complicated and ruinous system of taxation—the ordinary and extraordinary servicios, the pedidas and ayudas, the sacos and pastos and the alcavalas. Besides this they assisted in supporting the municipalities or the lordships and prelacies under which they lived, with the tallas, the pastos, the ninths or elevenths of merchandise and the peajes and barcajes, the pontazgos and portazgos, or tolls of various kinds which were heavier on them than on Christians, and, moreover, the Church received from them the customary tithes, oblations, and first-fruits.[254] The revenues from the Jewish aljamas, or communities, were always regarded as among the surest resources of the crown.

The shrewd intelligence and practical ability of the Jews, moreover, rendered their services in public affairs almost indispensable. It was in vain that the council of Rome, in 1078, renewed the old prohibitions to confide to them functions which would place them in command over Christians and equally in vain that, in 1081, Gregory VII addressed to Alfonso VI a vehement remonstrance on the subject, assuring him that to do so was to oppress the Church of God and exalt the synagogue of Satan, and that in seeking to please the enemies of Christ he was contemning Christ himself.[255] In fact, the most glorious centuries of the Reconquest were those in which the Jews enjoyed the greatest power in the courts of kings, prelates and nobles, in Castile and Aragon. The treasuries of the kingdoms were virtually in their hands, and it was their skill in organizing the supplies that rendered practicable the enterprises of such monarchs as Alfonso VI and VII, Fernando III and Jaime I.[256] To treat them as the Goths had done, or as the Church prescribed, had become a manifest impossibility.

CONDITION OF SPANISH JEWS

Under such circumstances it was natural that their numbers should increase until they formed a notable portion of the population. Of this an estimate can be made from a repartimiento, or assessment of taxes, in 1284, which shows that in Castile they paid a poll tax of 2,561,855 gold maravedís, which at three maravedís per head infers a total of 853,951 married or adult males.[257] This large aggregate was thoroughly organized. Each aljama or community had its rabbis with a Rabb Mayor at its head. Then each district, comprising one or more Christian bishoprics, was presided over by a Rabb Mayor, and, above all, was the Gaon or Nassi, the prince, whose duty it was to see that the laws of the race, both civil and religious, were observed in their purity.[258] As we have already seen, all questions between themselves were settled before their own judges under their own code, and even when a Jew was prosecuted criminally by the king, he was punishable in accordance with his own law.[259] So complete was the respect paid to this that their Sabbaths and other feasts were held inviolate; on these days they could not be summoned to court or be interfered with except by arrest for crime. Even polygamy was allowed to them.[260]

While their religion and laws were thus respected, they were required to respect Christianity. They were not allowed to read or keep books contrary to their own law or to the Christian law. Proselytism from Christianity was punishable by death and confiscation, and any insults offered to God, the Virgin, or the saints, were visited with a fine of ten maravedís or a hundred lashes.[261] Yet, if we are to believe the indignant Lucas of Tuy, writing about 1230, these simple restraints were scarce enforced. The heretic Cathari of Leon, he tells us, were wont to circumcise themselves in order, under the guise of Jews, to propound heretical dogmas and dispute with Christians; what they dared not utter as heretics they could freely disseminate as Jews. The governors and judges of the cities listened approvingly to heresies put forth by Jews, who were their friends and familiars, and if any one, inflamed by pious zeal, angered these Jews, he was treated as if he had touched the apple of the eye of the ruler; they also taught other Jews to blaspheme Christ and thus the Catholic faith was perverted.[262]

This represents a laxity of toleration impossible in any other land at the period, yet the Spanish Jews were not wholly shielded from inroads of foreign fanaticism. Before the crusading spirit had been organized for the conquest of the Holy Land, ardent knights sometimes came to wage war with the Spanish Saracens, and their religious fervor was aggrieved by the freedom enjoyed by the Jews. About 1068, bands of these strangers treated them as they had been wont to do at home, slaying and plundering them without mercy. The Church of Spain was as yet uncontaminated by race hatred and the bishops interposed to save the victims. For this they were warmly praised by Alexander II, who denounced the crusaders as acting either from foolish ignorance or blind cupidity. Those whom they would slay, he said, were perhaps predestined by God to salvation; he cited Gregory I to the same effect and pointed out the difference between Jews and Saracens, the latter of whom make war on Christians and could justly be assailed.[263] Had the chair of St. Peter always been so worthily filled, infinite misery might have been averted and the history of Christendom been spared some of its most repulsive pages.

When the crusading spirit extended to Spain, it sometimes aroused similar tendencies. In 1108, Archbishop Bernardo of Toledo took the cross and religious exaltation was ardent. The disastrous rout of Ucles came and was popularly ascribed to the Jews in the Castilian army, arousing indignation which manifested itself in a massacre at Toledo and in the burning of synagogues. Alfonso VI vainly endeavored to detect and punish those responsible and his death, in 1109, was followed by similar outrages which remained unavenged.[264] This was a sporadic outburst which soon exhausted itself. A severer trial came from abroad, when, in 1210, the Legate Arnaud of Narbonne led his crusading hosts to the assistance of Alfonso IX. Although their zeal for the faith was exhausted by the capture of Calatrava and few of them remained to share in the crowning glories of Las Navas de Tolosa, their ardor was sufficient to prompt an onslaught on the unoffending Jews. The native nobles sought in vain to protect the victims, who were massacred without mercy, so that Abravanel declares this to have been one of the bloodiest persecutions that they had suffered and that more Jews fled from Spain than Moses led out of Egypt.[265]

CONDITION OF SPANISH JEWS

This had no permanent influence on the condition of the Spanish Hebrews. During the long reigns of San Fernando III and Alfonso X of Castile and of Jaime I of Aragon, covering the greater part of the thirteenth century, the services which they rendered to the monarchs were repaid with increasing favor and protection. After Jaime had conquered Minorca he took, in 1247, all Jews settling there under the royal safeguard and threatened a fine of a thousand gold pieces for wrong inflicted on any of them and, in 1250, he required that Jewish as well as Christian testimony must be furnished in all actions, civil or criminal, brought by Christians against Jews. So, when in 1306 Philippe le Bel expelled the Jews from France and those of Majorca feared the same fate, Jaime II reassured them by pledging the royal faith that they should remain forever in the land, with full security for person and property, a pledge confirmed, in 1311, by his son and successor Sancho.[266] In Castile, when San Fernando conquered Seville, in 1244, he gave to the Jews a large space in the city, and, in defiance of the canons, he allotted to them four Moorish mosques to be converted into synagogues, thus founding the aljama of Seville, destined to a history so deplorable. Alfonso X, during his whole reign, patronized Jewish men of learning, whom he employed in translating works of value from Arabic and Hebrew; he built for them an observatory in Seville, where were made the records embodied in the Alfonsine Tables; he permitted those of Toledo to erect the magnificent synagogue now known as Santa María la Blanca, and Jews fondly relate that the Hebrew school, which he transferred from Córdova to Toledo, numbered twelve thousand students.[267] He was prompt to maintain their privileges, and, when the Jews of Burgos complained that in mixed suits the alcaldes would grant appeals to him when the Christian suitor was defeated, while refusing them to defeated Jews, he at once put an end to the discrimination, a decree which Sancho IV enforced with a penalty of a hundred maravedís when, in 1295, the complaint was repeated.[268] Yet Alfonso, in his systematic code known as the Partidas, which was not confirmed by the Córtes until 1348, allowed himself to be influenced by the teachings of the Church and the maxims of the imperial jurisprudence. He accepted the doctrine of the canons that the Jew was merely suffered to live in captivity among Christians; he was forbidden to speak ill of the Christian faith, and any attempt at proselytism was punished with death and confiscation. The murder rite was alluded to as a rumor, but in case it was practised it was a capital offence and the culprits were to be tried before the king himself. Jews were ineligible to any office in which they could oppress Christians; they were forbidden to have Christian servants, and the purchase of a Christian slave involved the death punishment. They were not to associate with Christians in eating, drinking, and bathing and the amour of a Jew with a Christian woman incurred death. While Jewish physicians might prescribe for Christian patients, the medicine must be compounded by a Christian, and the wearing of the hateful distinctive badge was ordered under penalty of ten gold maravedís or of ten lashes. At the same time Christians were strictly forbidden to commit any wrong on the person or property of Jews or to interfere in any way with their religious observances, and no coercion was to be used to induce them to baptism, for Christ wishes only willing service.[269]

ATTEMPTS AT CONVERSION

This was prophetic of evil days in the future and the reign of Alfonso proved to be the culminating point of Jewish prosperity. The capital and commerce of the land were to a great extent in their hands; they managed its finances and collected its revenues. King, noble and prelate entrusted their affairs to Jews, whose influence consequently was felt everywhere. To precipitate them from this position to the servitude prescribed by the canons required a prolonged struggle and may be said to have taken its remote origin in an attempt at their conversion. In 1263 the Dominican Fray Pablo Christiá, a converted Jew, challenged the greatest rabbi of the day, Moseh aben Najman, to a disputation which was presided over by Jaime I in his Barcelona palace. Each champion of course boasted of victory; the king dismissed Nachmanides not only with honor but with the handsome reward of three hundred pieces of gold, but he ordered certain Jewish books to be burnt and blasphemous passages in the Talmud to be expunged.[270] He further issued a decree ordering all his faithful Jews to assemble and listen reverently to Fray Pablo whenever he desired to dispute with them, to furnish him with what books he desired, and to defray his expenses, which they could deduct from their tribute.[271] Two years later Fray Pablo challenged another prominent Hebrew, the Rabbi Ben-Astruch, chief of the synagogue of Gerona, who refused until he had the pledge of King Jaime, and of the great Dominican St. Ramon de Peñafort, that he should not be held accountable for what he might utter in debate, but when, at the request of the Bishop of Gerona, Ben-Astruch wrote out his argument, the frailes Pablo and Ramon accused him of blasphemy, for it was manifestly impossible that a Jew could defend his strict monotheism and Messianic belief without a course of reasoning that would appear blasphemous to susceptible theologians. The rabbi alleged the royal pledge; Jaime proposed that he should be banished for two years and his book be burnt, but this did not satisfy the Dominican frailes and he dismissed the matter, forbidding the prosecution of the rabbi except before himself. Appeal seems to have been made to Clement IV, who addressed King Jaime in wrathful mood, blaming him for the favor shown to Jews and ordering him to deprive them of office and to depress and trample on them; Ben-Astruch especially, he said, should be made an example without, however, mutilating or slaying him.[272] This explosion of papal indignation fell harmless, but the zeal of the Dominicans had been inflamed and in laboring for the conversion of the Jews they not unnaturally aroused antagonism toward those who refused to abandon their faith. So long before as 1242, Jaime had issued an edict, confirmed by Innocent IV in 1245, empowering the Mendicant friars to have free access to Juderías and Morerías, to assemble the inhabitants and compel them to listen to sermons intended for their conversion.[273] The Dominicans now availed themselves of this with such vigor and excited such hostility to the Jews that Jaime was obliged to step forward for their protection. He assured the aljamas that they were not accountable for what was contained in their books, unless it was to the dishonor of Christ, the Virgin and the saints, and all accusations must be submitted to him in person; their freedom of trade was not to be curtailed; meat slaughtered by them could be freely exposed for sale in the Juderías, but not elsewhere; dealing in skins was not to be interfered with; their synagogues and cemeteries were to be subject to their exclusive control; their right to receive interest on loans was not to be impaired nor their power to collect debts; they were not to be compelled to listen to the friars outside of their Juderías, because otherwise they were liable to insult and dishonor, nor were the frailes when preaching in the synagogues to be accompanied by disorderly mobs, but at most by ten discreet Christians; finally, no novel limitations were to be imposed on them except by royal command after hearing them in opposition.[274]

These provisions indicate the direction in which Dominican zeal was striving to curtail the privileges so long enjoyed by the Jews and the royal intention to protect them against local legislation, which had doubtless been attempted under this impulsion. They were not remiss in gratitude, for when, in 1274, Jaime attended the council of Lyons, they contributed seventy-one thousand sueldos to enable him to appear with fitting magnificence.[275] The royal protection was speedily needed, for the tide of persecuting zeal was rising among the clergy and, shortly after his return from Lyons, on a Good Friday, the ecclesiastics of Gerona rang the bells, summoned the populace and attacked the Judería, which was one of the largest and most flourishing in Catalonia. They would have succeeded in destroying it but for the interposition of Jaime, who chanced to be in the city and who defended the Jews with force of arms.[276]

CONVERSION AND PERSECUTION

After the death of Jaime, in 1276, the ecclesiastics seem to have thought that they could safely obey the commands of Clement IV, especially as Nicholas IV, in 1278, instructed the Dominican general to depute pious brethren everywhere to convoke the Jews and labor for their conversion, with the significant addition that lists of those refusing baptism were to be made out and submitted to him, when he would determine what was to be done with them.[277] How the frailes interpreted the papal utterances is indicated in a letter of Pedro III to Pedro Bishop of Gerona, in April of this same year, 1278, reciting that he had already appealed repeatedly to him to put an end to the assaults of the clergy on the Jews, and now he learns that they have again attacked the Judería, stoning it from the tower of the cathedral and from their own houses and then assaulting it, laying waste the gardens and vineyards of the Jews and even destroying their graves and, when the royal herald stood up to forbid the work, drowning his voice with yells and derisions. Pedro accuses the bishop of stimulating the clergy to these outrages and orders him to put a stop to it and punish the offenders.[278] He was still more energetic when the French crusade under Philippe le Hardi was advancing to the siege of Gerona, in 1285, and his Moorish soldiers in the garrison undertook to sack the Call Juhich, or Judería, when he threw himself among them, mace in hand, struck down a number and finished by hanging several of them.[279] He offered no impediment, however, to the conversion of the Jews for, in 1279, he ordered his officials to compel them to listen to the Franciscans, who, in obedience to the commands of the pope, might wish to preach to them in their synagogues.[280] These intrusions of frailes into the Juderías inevitably led to trouble, for there is significance in a letter of Jaime II, April 4, 1305, to his representative in Palma, alluding to recent scandals, for the future prevention of which he orders that no priest shall enter the Judería to administer the sacraments without being accompanied by a secular official. This precaution was unavailing, for it doubtless was a continuance of such provocation that led to a disturbance, about 1315, affording to King Jaime an excuse for confiscating the whole property of the aljama of Palma and then commuting the penalty to a fine of 95,000 libras. The source of these troubles is suggested by a royal order of 1327 to the Governor of Majorca, forbidding the baptism of Jewish children under seven years of age or the forcible baptism of Jews of any age.[281]

During all this period there had been an Inquisition in Aragon which, of course, could not interfere with Jews as such, for they were beyond its jurisdiction, but which stood ready to punish more or less veritable efforts at propagandism or offences of fautorship. The crown had no objection to using it as a means of extortion, while preventing it from exterminating or crippling subjects so useful. A diploma of Jaime II, October 14, 1311, recites that the inquisitor, Fray Juan Llotger, had learned that the aljamas of Barcelona, Tarragona, Monblanch and Vilafranca had harbored and fed certain Jewish converts, who had relapsed to Judaism, as well as others who had come from foreign parts. He had given Fray Juan the necessary support, enabling him to verify the accusations on the spot and had received his report to that effect. Now, therefore, he issues a free and full pardon to the offending aljamas, with assurance that they shall not be prosecuted either civilly or criminally, for which grace, on October 10th, they had paid him ten thousand sueldos. In this case there seems to have been no regular trial by the Inquisition, the king having superseded it by his action. In another more serious case he intervened after trial and sentence to commute the punishment. In 1326 the aljama of Calatayud subjected itself to the Inquisition by not only receiving back a woman who had been baptized but by circumcising two Christians. Tried by the inquisitor and the Bishop of Tarazona it had been found guilty and it had been sentenced to a fine of twenty thousand sueldos and its members to confiscation, but King Jaime, by a cédula of February 6, 1326, released them from the confiscation and all other penalties on payment of the fine.[282]

CURTAILMENT OF PRIVILEGES

Although Castile was slower than Aragon to receive impulses from abroad, in the early fourteenth century we begin to find traces of a similar movement of the Church against the Jews. In 1307 the aljama of Toledo complained to Fernando IV that the dean and chapter had obtained from Clement V bulls conferring on them jurisdiction over Jews, in virtue of which they were enforcing the canons against usury and stripping the Jewish community of its property. At this time there was no question in Spain, such as we shall see debated hereafter, of the royal prerogative to control obnoxious papal letters, and Fernando at once ordered the chapter to surrender the bulls; all action under them was pronounced void and restitution in double was threatened for all damage inflicted. The Jews, he said, were his Jews; they were not to be incapacitated from paying their taxes and the pope had no power to infringe on the rights of the crown. He instructed Ferran Nuñez de Pantoja to compel obedience and, after some offenders had been arrested, the frightened canons surrendered the bulls and abandoned their promising speculation, but the affair left behind it enmities which displayed themselves deplorably afterwards.[283]

In spite of the royal favor and protection, the legislation of the period commences to manifest a tendency to limit the privileges of the Jews, showing that popular sentiment was gradually turning against them. As early as 1286 Sancho IV agreed to deprive them of their special judges and, though the law was not generally enforced, it indicates the spirit that called for it and procured its repetition in the Córtes of Valladolid in 1307.[284] Complaints were loud and numerous of the Jewish tax-gatherers, and the young Fernando IV was obliged repeatedly to promise that the revenues should not be farmed out nor their collection be entrusted to caballeros, ecclesiastics or Jews. The turbulence which attended his minority and short reign and the minority of his son, Alfonso XI, afforded a favorable opportunity for the manifestation of hostility and the royal power was too weak to prevent the curtailment in various directions of the Jewish privileges.[285] We have seen, in the preceding chapter, the temper in which the Spanish prelates returned from the Council of Vienne in 1312 and the proscriptive legislation enacted by them in the Council of Zamora in 1313 and its successors. Everything favored the development of this spirit of intolerance, and at the Córtes of Burgos, in 1315, the regents of the young Alfonso XI conceded that the Clementine canon, abrogating all laws that permitted usury, should be enforced, that all mixed actions, civil and criminal, should be tried by the royal judges, that the evidence of a Jew should not be received against a Christian while that of a Christian was good against a Jew, that Jews were not to assume Christian names, Christian nurses were not to suckle Jews and sumptuary laws were directed against the luxury of Jewish vestments.[286]

This may be said to mark the commencement of the long struggle which, in spite of their wonderful powers of resistance, was to end in the destruction of the Spanish Jews. Throughout the varying phases of the conflict, the Church, in its efforts to arouse popular hatred, was powerfully aided by the odium which the Jews themselves excited through their ostentation, their usury and their functions as public officials.

A strong race is not apt to be an amiable one. The Jews were proud of their ancient lineage and the purity of their descent from the kings and heroes of the Old Testament. A man who could trace his ancestry to David would look with infinite scorn on the hidalgos who boasted of the blood of Lain Calvo and, if the favor of the monarch rendered safe the expression of his feelings, his haughtiness was not apt to win friends among those who repaid his contempt with interest. The Oriental fondness for display was a grievous offence among the people. The wealth of the kingdom was, to a great extent, in Jewish hands, affording ample opportunity of contrast between their magnificence and the poverty of the Christian multitude, and the lavish extravagance with which they adorned themselves, their women and their retainers, was well fitted to excite envy more potent for evil because more wide-spread than enmity arising from individual wrongs.[287] Shortly before the catastrophe, at the close of the fifteenth century, Affonso V of Portugal, who was well-affected towards them, asked the chief rabbi, Joseph-Ibn-Jachia, why he did not prevent his people from a display provocative of the assertion that their wealth was derived from robbery of the Christians, adding that he required no answer, for nothing save spoliation and massacre would cure them of it.[288]

CAUSES OF ENMITY

A more practical and far-reaching cause of enmity was the usury, through which a great portion of their wealth was acquired. The money-lender has everywhere been an unpopular character and, in the Middle Ages, he was especially so. When the Church pronounced any interest or any advantage, direct or indirect, derived from loans to be a sin for which the sinner could not be admitted to penance without making restitution; when the justification of taking interest was regarded as a heresy to be punished as such by the Inquisition, a stigma was placed on the money-lender, his gains were rendered hazardous, and his calling became one which an honorable Christian could not follow.[289] Mercantile Italy early outgrew these dogmas which retarded so greatly all material development and it managed to reconcile, per fas et nefas, the canons with the practical necessities of business, but elsewhere throughout Europe, wherever Jews were allowed to exist, the lending of money or goods on interest inevitably fell, for the most part, into their hands, for they were governed by their own moral code and were not subject to the Church. It exhausted all devices to coerce them through their rulers, but the object aimed at was too incompatible with the necessities of advancing civilization to have any influence save the indefinite postponement of relief to the borrower.[290]

The unsavoriness of the calling, its risks and the scarcity of coin during the Middle Ages, conspired to render the current rates of interest exorbitantly oppressive. In Aragon the Jews were allowed to charge 20 per cent. per annum, in Castile 33⅓,[291] and the constant repetition of these limitations and the provisions against all manner of ingenious devices, by fictitious sales and other frauds, to obtain an illegal increase, show how little the laws were respected in the grasping avarice with which the Jews speculated on the necessities of their customers.[292] In 1326 the aljama of Cuenca, considering the legal rate of 33⅓ per cent. too low, refused absolutely to lend either money or wheat for the sowing. This caused great distress and the town-council entered into negotiations, resulting in an agreement by which the Jews were authorized to charge 40 per cent.[293] In 1385 the Córtes of Valladolid describe one cause of the necessity of submitting to whatever exactions the Jews saw fit to impose, when it says that the new lords, to whom Henry of Trastamara had granted towns and villages, were accustomed to imprison their vassals and starve and torture them to force payment of what they had not got, obliging them to get money from Jews to whom they gave whatever bonds were demanded.[294] Monarchs as well as peasants were subject to these impositions. In Navarre, a law of Felipe III, in 1330, limited the rate of interest to 20 per cent. and we find this paid by his grandson, Carlos III, in 1399, for a loan of 1000 florins but, in 1401, he paid at the rate of 35 per cent. for a loan of 2000 florins, and in 1402 his queen, Doña Leonor, borrowed 70 florins from her Jewish physician Abraham at four florins a month, giving him silver plate as security; finding at the end of twenty-one months that the interest amounted to 84 florins, she begged a reduction and he contented himself with 30 florins.[295]

When money could be procured in no other way, when the burgher had to raise it to pay his taxes or the extortions of his lord and the husbandman had to procure seed-corn or starve, it is easy to see how all had to submit to the exactions of the money-lender; how, in spite of occasional plunder and scaling of debts, the Jews absorbed the floating capital of the community and how recklessly they aided the frailes in concentrating popular detestation on themselves. It was in vain that the Ordenamiento de Alcalá, in 1348, prohibited usury to Moors and Jews as well as to Christians; it was an inevitable necessity and it continued to flourish.[296]

CAUSES OF ENMITY

Equally effective in arousing antipathy were the functions of the Jews as holders of office and especially as almojarifes and recabdores—farmers of the revenues and collectors of taxes, which brought them into the closest and most exasperating relations with the people. In that age of impoverished treasuries and rude financial expedients, the customary mode of raising funds was by farming out the revenues to the highest bidder of specific sums; as the profit of the speculation depended on the amount to be wrung from the people, the subordinate collectors would be merciless in exaction and indefatigable in tracing out delinquents, exciting odium which extended to all the race. It was in vain that the Church repeatedly prohibited the employment of Jews in public office. Their ability and skill rendered them indispensable to monarchs, nobles, and prelates, and the complaints which arose against them on all sides were useless. Thus in the quarrel between the chapter of Toledo and the great Archbishop Rodrigo, in which the former appealed to Gregory IX, in 1236, one of the grievances alleged is that he appointed Jews to be provosts of the common table of the chapter, thus enabling them to defraud the canons; they even passed through the church and often entered the chapter-house itself to the great scandal of all Christians; they collected the tithes and thirds and governed the vassals and possessions of the Church, greatly enriching themselves by plundering the patrimony of the Crucified, wherefore the pope was earnestly prayed to expel the Jews from these offices and compel them to make restitution.[297]

When prelates such as Archbishop Rodrigo paid so little heed to the commands of the Church, it is not to be supposed that monarchs were more obedient or were disposed to forego the advantages derivable from the services of these accomplished financiers. How these men assisted their masters while enriching themselves is exemplified by Don Çag de la Maleha, almojarife mayor to Alfonso X. When the king, in 1257, was raising an army to subdue Aben-Nothfot, King of Niebla, Don Çag undertook to defray all the expenses of the campaign in consideration of the assignment to him of certain taxes, some of which he was still enjoying in 1272.[298] It was useless for the people who groaned under the exactions of these efficient officials to protest against their employment and to extort from the monarchs repeated promises no longer to employ them. The promises were never kept and, until the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, this source of irritation continued. There was, it is true, one exception, the result of which was not conducive to a continuance of the experiment. In 1385 the Córtes of Valladolid obtained from Juan I a decree prohibiting the employment of Jews as tax-collectors, not only by the king but also by prelates and nobles, in consequence of which ecclesiastics obtained the collection of the royal revenues, but when they were called upon to settle they excommunicated the alcaldes who sought to compel payment, leading to great confusion and bitterer complaints than ever.[299]

When the Jews thus gave grounds so ample for popular dislike, it says much for the kindly feeling between the races that the efforts of the Church to excite a spirit of intolerance made progress so slow. These took form, as a comprehensive and systematic movement at the Council of Zamora, in 1313, and its successors, described in the preceding chapter, but in spite of them Alfonso XI continued to protect his Jewish subjects and the labors of the good fathers awoke no popular response. In Aragon a canon of the Council of Lérida, in 1325, forbidding Christians to be present at Jewish weddings and circumcisions, shows how fruitless as yet had been the effort to produce mutual alienation.[300]

THE BLACK DEATH

Navarre had the earliest foretaste of the wrath to come. It was then under its French princes and, when Charles le Bel died, February 1, 1328, a zealous Franciscan, Fray Pedro Olligoyen, apparently taking advantage of the interregnum, stirred, with his eloquent preaching, the people to rise against the Jews, and led them to pillage and slaughter. The storm burst on the aljama of Estella, March 1st, and rapidly spread throughout the kingdom. Neither age nor sex was spared and the number of victims is variously estimated at from six to ten thousand. Queen Jeanne and her husband Philippe d’Evreux, who succeeded to the throne, caused Olligoyen to be prosecuted, but the result is not known. They further speculated on the terrible massacre by imposing heavy fines on Estella and Viana and by seizing the property of the dead and fugitive Jews, and they also levied on the ruined aljamas the sum of fifteen thousand livres to defray their coronation expenses. Thus fatally weakened, the Jews of Navarre were unable to endure the misfortunes of the long and disastrous reign of Charles le Mauvais (1350–1387). A general emigration resulted, to arrest which Charles prohibited the purchase of landed property from Jews without special royal license. A list of taxables, in 1366, shows only 453 Jewish families and 150 Moorish, not including Pampeluna, where both races were taxable by the bishop. Although Charles and his son Charles le Noble (1387–1425) had Jews for almojarifes, it was in vain that they endeavored to allure the fugitives back by privileges and exemptions. The aljamas continued to dwindle until the revenue from them was inconsiderable.[301]

In Castile and Aragon the Black Death caused massacres of Jews, as elsewhere throughout Europe, though not so wide-spread and terrible. In Catalonia the troubles commenced at Barcelona and spread to other places, in spite of the efforts of Pedro IV, both in prevention and punishment. They had little special religious significance, but were rather the result of the relaxation of social order in the fearful disorganization accompanying the pestilence and, after it had passed, the survivors, Christians, Jews and Mudéjares were for a moment knit more closely together in the bonds of a common humanity.[302] It is to the credit of Clement VI that he did what he could to arrest the fanaticism which, especially in Germany, offered to the Jews the alternative of death or baptism. Following, as he said, in the footsteps of Calixtus II, Eugenius III, Alexander III, Clement III, Cœlestin III, Innocent III, Gregory IX, Nicholas III, Honorius IV and Nicholas IV, he pointed out the absurdity of attributing the plague to the Jews. They had offered to submit to judicial examination and sentence, besides which the pestilence raged in lands where there were no Jews. He therefore ordered all prelates to proclaim to the people assembled for worship that Jews were not to be beaten, wounded, or slain and that those who so treated them were subjected to the anathema of the Holy See. It was a timely warning and worthy of one who spoke in the name of Christ, but it availed little to overcome the influence of the assiduous teaching of intolerance through so many centuries.[303]

INCREASING HOSTILITY

When Pedro the Cruel ascended the throne of Castile, in 1350, the Jews might reasonably look forward to a prosperous future, but his reign in reality proved the turning-point in their fortunes. He surrounded himself with Jews and confided to them the protection of his person, while the rebellious faction, headed by Henry of Trastamara, his illegitimate brother, declared themselves the enemies of the race and used Pedro’s favor for them as a political weapon. He was asserted to be a Jew, substituted for a girl born of Queen María whose husband, Alfonso XI, was said to have sworn that he would kill her if she did not give him a boy. It was also reported that he was no Christian but an adherent to the Law of Moses and that the government of Castile was wholly in the hands of Jews. It was not difficult therefore to arouse clerical hostility, as manifested by Urban V, who denounced him as a rebel to the Church, a fautor of Jews and Moors, a propagator of infidelity and a slayer of Christians.[304] Of this the insurgents took full advantage and demonstrated their piety in the most energetic manner. When, in 1355, Henry of Trastamara and his brother, the Master of Santiago, entered Toledo to liberate Queen Blanche, who was confined in the alcázar, they sacked the smaller Judería and slew its twelve hundred inmates without sparing sex or age. They also besieged the principal Judería, which was walled around and defended by Pedro’s followers until his arrival with reinforcements drove off the assailants.[305] Five years later when, in 1360, Henry of Trastamara invaded Castile with the aid of Pedro IV of Aragon, on reaching Najara he ordered a massacre of the Jews and, as Ayala states that this was done to win popularity, it may be assumed that free license for pillage was granted. Apparently stimulated by this example the people of Miranda del Ebro, led by Pero Martínez, son of the precentor and by Pero Sánchez de Bañuelas, fell upon the Jews of their town, but King Pedro hastened thither and, as a deterrent example, boiled the one leader and roasted the other.[306] When at length, in 1366, Henry led into Spain Bertrand de Guesclin and his hordes of Free Companions, the slaughter of the Jews was terrible. Multitudes fled and the French chronicler deplores the number that sought refuge in Paris and preyed upon the people with their usuries. The aljama of Toledo purchased exemption with a million of maravedís, raised in ten days, to pay off the mercenaries but, as the whole land lay for a time at the mercy of the reckless bands, slaughter and pillage were general. Finally the fratricide at Montiel, in 1369, deprived the Jews of their protector and left Henry undisputed master of Castile.[307] What they had to expect from him was indicated by his levying, June 6, 1369, within three months of his brother’s murder, twenty thousand doblas on the Judería of Toledo and authorizing the sale at auction, not only of the property of the inmates, but of their persons into slavery, or their imprisonment in chains with starvation or torture, until the amount should be raised. It was doubtless to earn popularity that about the same time he released all Christians and Moors from obligation to pay debts due to Jews, though he was subsequently persuaded to rescind this decree, which would have destroyed the ability of the Jews to pay their imposts.[308]

Yet the Jews were indispensable in the conduct of affairs and Henry was obliged to employ them, like his predecessors. His contador mayor was Yuçaf Pichon, a Jew of the highest consideration, who incurred the enmity of some of the leaders of his people. They accused him to the king, who demanded of him forty thousand doblas, which sum he paid within twenty days. With rancor unsatisfied, when Henry died, in 1379, and his son Juan I came to Burgos to be crowned, they obtained from him an order to his alguazil to put to death a mischief-making Jew whom they would designate. Armed with this they took the alguazil to Pichon’s house in the early morning, called him on some pretext from his bed and pointed him out as the designated person to the alguazil, who killed him on the spot. Juan was greatly angered; the alguazil was punished with the loss of a hand, the judge of the Judería of Burgos was put to death and the Jews of Castile were deprived of jurisdiction over the lives of their fellows.[309]

We have already seen how the legislation of this period was rapidly taking a direction unfavorable to the Jews. The accession of the House of Trastamara had distinctly injured their position, the Church had freer scope to excite popular prejudice, while their retention as tax-collectors and their usurious practices afforded ample material for the stimulation of popular vindicativeness. The condition existed for a catastrophe, and the man to precipitate it was not lacking. Ferran Martínez, Archdeacon of Ecija and Official, or judicial representative of the Archbishop of Seville, Pedro Barroso, was a man of indomitable firmness and, though without much learning, was highly esteemed for his unusual devoutness, his solid virtue and his eminent charity—which latter quality he evinced in founding and supporting the hospital of Santa María in Seville.[310] Unfortunately he was a fanatic and the Jews were the object of his remorseless zeal, which his high official position gave him ample opportunity of gratifying. In his sermons he denounced them savagely and excited popular passion against them, keeping them in constant apprehension of an outbreak while, as ecclesiastical judge, he extended his jurisdiction illegally over them, to their frequent damage. In conjunction with other episcopal officials he issued letters to the magistrates of the towns ordering them to expel the Jews—letters which he sought to enforce by personal visitations. The aljama of Seville, the largest and richest in Castile, appealed to the king and, little as Henry of Trastamara loved the Jews, the threatened loss to his finances led him, in August, 1378, to formally command Martínez to desist from his incendiary course, nor was this the first warning, as is shown by allusions to previous letters of the same import. To this Martínez paid no obedience and the aljama had recourse to Rome, where it procured bulls for its protection, which Martínez disregarded as contemptuously as he had the royal mandate. Complaint was again made to the throne and Juan I, in 1382, repeated his father’s commands to no effect, for another royal letter of 1383 accuses Martínez of saying in his sermons that he knew the king would regard as a service any assault or slaying of the Jews and that impunity might be relied upon. For this he was threatened with punishment that would make an example of him, but it did not silence him and, in 1388, the frightened aljama summoned him before the alcaldes and had the three royal letters read, summoning him to obey them. He replied with insults and, a week later, put in a formal answer in which he said that he was but obeying Christ and the laws and that, if he were to execute the laws, he would tear down the twenty-three synagogues in Seville as they had all been illegally erected.[311]

THE MASSACRES OF 1391

The dean and chapter became alarmed and appealed to the king, but Juan, in place of enforcing his neglected commands, replied that he would look into the matter; the zeal of the archdeacon was holy, but it must not be allowed to breed disturbance for, although the Jews were wicked, they were under the royal protection. This vacillation encouraged Martínez who labored still more strenuously to inflame the people, newly prejudiced against the Jews by the murder of Yuçaf Pichon, who had been greatly beloved by all Seville.[312] No one dared to interfere in their defence, but Martínez furnished an opportunity of silencing him by calling in question in his sermons the powers of the pope in certain matters. He was summoned before an assembly of theologians and doctors, when he was as defiant of the episcopal authority as of the royal, rendering himself contumacious and suspect of heresy, wherefore on August 2, 1389, Archbishop Barroso suspended him both as to jurisdiction and preaching until his trial should be concluded.[313] This gave the Jews a breathing-space, but Barroso died, July 7, 1390, followed, October 9, by Juan I. The chapter must have secretly sympathized with Martínez, for it elected him one of the provisors of the diocese sede vacante, thus clothing him with increased power, and we hear nothing more of the trial for heresy.[314]

Juan had left as his successor Henry III, known as El Doliente, or the Invalid, a child of eleven, and quarrels threatening civil war at once arose over the question of the regency. Martínez now had nothing to fear and he lost no time in sending, December 8th, to the clergy of the towns in the diocese, commands under pain of excommunication to tear down within three hours the synagogues of the enemies of God calling themselves Jews; the building materials were to be used for the repair of the churches; if resistance was offered it was to be suppressed by force and an interdict be laid on the town until the good work was accomplished.[315] These orders were not universally obeyed but enough ruin was wrought to lead the frightened aljama of Seville to appeal to the regency, threatening to leave the land if they could not be protected from Martínez. The answer to this was prompt and decided. On December 22d a missive was addressed to the dean and chapter and was officially read to them, January 10, 1391. It held them responsible for his acts as they had elected him provisor and had not checked him; he must be at once removed from office, be forced to abstain from preaching and to rebuild the ruined synagogues, in default of which they must make good all damages and incur a fine of a thousand gold doblas each with other arbitrary punishments. Letters of similar import were addressed at the same time to Martínez himself. On January 15th the chapter again assembled and presented its official reply, which deprived Martínez of the provisorship, forbade him to preach against the Jews and required him within a year to rebuild all synagogues destroyed by his orders. Then Martínez arose and protested that neither king nor chapter had jurisdiction over him and their sentences were null and void. The synagogues had been destroyed by order of Archbishop Barroso—two of them in his lifetime—and they had been built illegally without licence. His defiant answer concluded with a declaration that he repented of nothing that he had done.[316]

THE MASSACRES OF 1391

The result justified the dauntless reliance of Martínez on the popular passion which he had been stimulating for so many years. What answer the regency made to this denial of its jurisdiction the documents fail to inform us, but no effective steps were taken to restrain him. His preaching continued as violent as ever and the Seville mob grew more and more restless in the prospect of gratifying at once its zeal for the faith and its thirst for pillage. In March the aspect of affairs was more alarming than ever; the rabble were feeling their way, with outrages and insults, and the Judería was in hourly danger of being sacked. Juan Alonso Guzman, Count of Niebla, the most powerful noble of Andalusia, was adelantado of the province and alcalde mayor of Seville and his kinsman, Alvar Pérez de Guzman, was alguazil mayor. On March 15th they seized some of the most turbulent of the crowd and proceeded to scourge two of them but, in place of awing the populace, this led to open sedition. The Guzmans were glad to escape with their lives and popular fury was directed against the Jews, resulting in considerable bloodshed and plunder, but at length the authorities, aided by the nobles, prevailed and order was apparently restored. By this time the agitation was spreading to Córdova, Toledo, Burgos and other places. Everywhere fanaticism and greed were aroused and the Council of Regency vainly sent pressing commands to all the large cities, in the hope of averting the catastrophe. Martínez continued his inflammatory harangues and sought to turn to the advantage of religion the storm which he had aroused, by procuring a general forcible conversion of the Jews. The excitement increased and, on June 9th the tempest broke in a general rising of the populace against the Judería. Few of its inhabitants escaped; the number of slain was estimated at four thousand and those of the survivors who did not succeed in flying only saved their lives by accepting baptism. Of the three synagogues two were converted into churches for the Christians who settled in the Jewish quarter and the third sufficed for the miserable remnant of Israel which slowly gathered together after the storm had passed.[317]

From Seville the flame spread through the kingdoms of Castile from shore to shore. In the paralysis of public authority, during the summer and early autumn of 1391, one city after another followed the example; the Juderías were sacked, the Jews who would not submit to baptism were slain and fanaticism and cupidity held their orgies unchecked. The Moors escaped, for though many wished to include them in the slaughter, they were restrained by a wholesome fear of reprisals on the Christian captives in Granada and Africa. The total number of victims was estimated at fifty thousand, but this is probably an exaggeration. For this wholesale butchery and its accompanying rapine there was complete immunity. In Castile there was no attempt made to punish the guilty. It is true that when Henry attained his majority, in 1395, and came to Seville, he caused Martínez to be arrested, but the penalty inflicted must have been trivial, for we are told that it did not affect the high estimation in which he was held and, on his death in 1404, he bequeathed valuable possessions to the Hospital of Santa María. The misfortunes of the aljama of Seville were rendered complete when, in January, 1396, Henry bestowed on two of his favorites all the houses and lands of the Jews there and in May he followed this by forbidding that any of those concerned in the murder and pillage should be harassed with punishment or fines.[318]

In Aragon there was a king more ready to meet the crisis and the warning given at Seville was not neglected. Popular excitement was manifesting itself by assaults, robberies and murders in many places. In the city of Valencia, which had a large Jewish population, the authorities exerted themselves to repress these excesses and King Juan I ordered gallows to be erected in the streets, while a guard made nightly rounds along the walls of the Judería. These precautions and the presence of the Infante Martin, who was recruiting for an expedition to Sicily, postponed the explosion, but it came at last. On Sunday, July 9, 1391, a crowd of boys, with crosses made of cane and a banner, marched to one of the gates of the Judería, crying death or baptism for the Jews. By the time the gate was closed a portion of the boys were inside and those excluded shouted that the Jews were killing their comrades. Hard by there was a recruiting station with its group of idle vagabonds, who rushed to the Judería and the report spread through the city that the Jews were slaying Christians. The magistrates and the Infante hastened to the gate, but the frightened Jews kept it closed and thus they were excluded, while the mob effected entrance from adjoining houses and by the old rampart below the bridge. The Judería was sacked and several hundred Jews were slain before the tumult could be suppressed. Demonstrations were also made on the Morería, but troops were brought up and the mob was driven back. Some seventy or eighty arrests were made and the next day a searching investigation as to the vast amount of plunder led to the recovery of much of it.[319]

THE MASSACRES OF 1391

This added to the agitation which went on increasing. With August 4th came the feast of St. Dominic, when the Dominicans were everywhere conspicuous and active. The next day, as though in concert, the tempest burst in Toledo and Barcelona—in the former city with fearful massacre and conflagration. In the latter, despite the warning at Valencia, the authorities were unprepared when the mob arose and rushed into the call or Jewry, slaying without mercy. A general demand for baptism went up and, when the civic forces arrived the slaughter was stopped, but the plunder continued. Some of the pillagers were arrested, and among them a few Castilians who, as safe victims, were condemned to death the next day. Under pretext that this was unjust the mob broke into the gaol and liberated the prisoners. Then the cry arose to finish with the Jews, who had taken refuge in the Castillo Nuevo, which was subjected to a regular siege. Ringing the bells brought in crowds of peasants eager for disorder and spoil. The Baylía was attacked and the registers of crown property destroyed, in the hope of evading taxes. On August 8th the Castillo Nuevo was entered and all Jews who would not accept baptism were put to the sword; the castle was sacked and the peasants departed laden with booty. The Judería of Barcelona must have been small, for the number of slain was estimated at only three hundred.[320]

At Palma, the capital of Majorca, some three hundred Jews were put to death and the rest escaped only by submitting to baptism. The riots continued for some time and spread to attacks on the public buildings, until the gentlemen of the city armed themselves and, after a stubborn conflict, suppressed the disturbance. The chief aljamas of the kingdom were the appanage of the queen consort and Queen Violante made good her losses by levying on the island a fine of 150,000 gold florins. The gentlemen of Palma remonstrated at the hardship of being punished after putting down the rioters; she reduced the fine to 120,000, swearing by the life of her unborn child that she would have justice. The fine was paid and soon afterwards she gave birth to a still-born infant.[321] Thus in one place after another—Gerona, Lérida, Saragossa—the subterranean flame burst forth, fed by the infernal passions of fanaticism, greed and hatred. It seems incredible that, with the royal power resolved to protect its unhappy subjects, these outrages should have continued throughout the summer into autumn for, when the local authorities were determined to suppress these uprisings, as at Murviedro and Castellon de la Plana, they were able to do so.[322]

If Juan I was unable to prevent the massacres he at least was determined not to let them pass unpunished; many executions followed and some commutations for money payments were granted.[323] The aljama of Barcelona had been a source of much profit to the crown and he strove to re-establish it in new quarters, offering various privileges and exemptions to attract newcomers. It was crushed however beyond resuscitation; but few of its members had escaped by hiding; nearly all had been slain or baptized and, great as were the franchises offered, the memory of the catastrophe seems to have outweighed them. In 1395 the new synagogue was converted into a church or monastery of Trinitarian monks and the wealthy aljama of Barcelona, with its memories of so many centuries, ceased to exist.[324] About the year 1400, the city obtained a privilege which prohibited the formation of a Judería or the residence of a Jew within its limits. Antipathy to Judaism, as we shall see, was rapidly increasing and when, in 1425, Alfonso VI confirmed this privilege he decreed that all Jews then in the city should depart within sixty days, under penalty of scourging, and thereafter a stay of fifteen days was the utmost limit allowed for temporary residence.[325]

EFFECTS OF THE MASSACRES

If I have dwelt in what may seem disproportionate length on this guerra sacra contra los Judios, as Villanueva terms these massacres,[326] it is because they form a turning-point in Spanish history. In the relations between the races of the Peninsula the old order of things was closed and the new order, which was to prove so benumbing to material and intellectual development, was about to open. The immediate results were not long in becoming apparent. Not only was the prosperity of Castile and Aragon diminished by the shock to the commerce and industry so largely in Jewish hands, but the revenues of the crown, the churches and the nobles, based upon the taxation of the Jews, suffered enormously. Pious foundations were ruined and bishops had to appeal to the king for assistance to maintain the services of their cathedrals. Of the Jews who had escaped, the major portion had only done so by submitting to baptism and these were no longer subject to the capitation tax and special imposts which had furnished the surest part of the income of cities, prelates, nobles and sovereigns.[327] Still the converted Jews, with their energy and intelligence remained, unfettered and unhampered in the pursuit of wealth and advancement, which was to benefit the community as well as themselves. It was reserved for a further progress in the path now entered to deprive Spain of the services of her most industrious children.

The most deplorable result of the massacres was that they rendered inevitable this further progress in the same direction. The Church had at last succeeded in opening the long-desired chasm between the races. It had looked on in silence while the Archdeacon of Ecija was bringing about the catastrophe and pope and prelate uttered no word to stay the long tragedy of murder and spoliation, which they regarded as an act of God to bring the stubborn Hebrew into the fold of Christ. Henceforth the old friendliness between Jew and Christian was, for the most part, a thing of the past. Fanaticism and intolerance were fairly aroused, to grow stronger with each generation as fresh wrongs and oppression widened the abyss between believer and unbeliever and as new preachers of discord arose to teach the masses that kindness to the Jew was sin against God. Thus gradually the Spanish character changed until it was prepared to accept the Inquisition, which, by a necessary reaction, stimulated the development of bigotry until Spain became what we shall see it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

That the Archdeacon of Ecija was in reality the remote founder of the Inquisition will become evident when we consider the fortunes of the new class created by the massacres of 1391—that of the converted Jews, known as New Christians, Marranos or Conversos. Conversion, as we have seen, was always favored by the laws and the convert was received with a heartiness of social equality which shows that as yet there was no antagonism of race but only of religion. The Jew who became a Christian was eligible to any position in Church or State or to any matrimonial alliance for which his abilities or character fitted him, but conversions had hitherto been too rare and the converts, for the most part, too humble, for them to play any distinctive part in the social organization. While the massacres, doubtless, were largely owing to the attractions of disorder and pillage, the religious element in them was indicated by the fact that everywhere the Jews were offered the alternative of baptism and that where willingness was shown to embrace Christianity, slaughter was at once suspended. The pressure was so fierce and overwhelming that whole communities were baptized, as we have seen at Barcelona and Palma. At Valencia, an official report, made on July 14th, five days after the massacre, states that all the Jews, except a few who were in hiding, had already been baptized; they came forward demanding baptism in such droves that, in all the churches, the holy chrism was exhausted and the priests knew not where to get more, but each morning the crismera would be found miraculously filled, so that the supply held out, nor was this by any means the only sign that the whole terrible affair was the mysterious work of Providence to effect so holy an end. The chiefs of the synagogues were included among the converts and we can believe the statement, current at the time, that in Valencia alone the conversions amounted to eleven thousand. Moreover it was not only in the scenes of massacre that this good work went on. So startling and relentless was the slaughter that panic destroyed the unyielding fortitude so often manifested by the Jews under trial. In many places they did not wait for a rising of the Christians but, at the first menace, or even in mere anticipation of danger, they came eagerly forward and clamored to be admitted into the Church. In Aragon the total number of conversions was reckoned at a hundred thousand and in Castile as certainly not less and this is probably no great exaggeration.[328] Neophytes such as these could scarce be expected to prove steadfast in their new faith.

RISE OF THE CONVERSOS

In this tempest of proselytism the central figure was San Vicente Ferrer, to the fervor of whose preaching posterity attributed the popular excitement leading to the massacres.[329] This doubtless does him an injustice, but the fact that he was on hand in Valencia on the fatal 9th of July, may perhaps be an indication that the affair was prearranged. His eloquence was unrivalled; immense crowds assembled to drink in his words; no matter what was the native language of the listener, we are told that his Catalan was intelligible to Moor, Greek, German, Frenchman, Italian and Hungarian, while the virtue which flowed from him on these occasions healed the infirm and repeatedly restored the dead to life.[330] Such was the man who, during the prolonged massacres and subsequently, while the terror which they excited continued to dominate the unfortunate race, traversed Spain from end to end, with restless and indefatigable zeal, preaching, baptizing and numbering his converts by the thousand—on a single day in Toledo he is said to have converted no less than four thousand. It is to be hoped that, in some cases at least, he may have restrained the murderous mob, if only by hiding its victims in the baptismal font.

The Jews slowly recovered themselves from the terrible shock; they emerged from their concealment and endeavored, with characteristic dauntless energy, to rebuild their shattered fortunes. Now, however, with diminished numbers and exhausted wealth, they had to face new enemies. Not only was Christian fanaticism inflamed and growing even stronger, but the wholesale baptisms had created the new class of Conversos, who were thenceforward to become the deadliest opponents of their former brethren. Many chiefs of the synagogue, learned rabbis and leaders of their people, had cowered before the storm and had embraced Christianity. Whether their conversion was sincere or not, they had broken with the past and, with the keen intelligence of their race, they could see that a new career was open to them in which energy and capacity could gratify ambition, unfettered by the limitations surrounding them in Judaism. That they should hate, with an exceeding hatred, those who had proved true to the faith amid tribulation was inevitable. The renegade is apt to be bitterer against those whom he has abandoned than is the opponent by birthright and, in such a case as this, consciousness of the contempt felt by the steadfast children of Israel for the weaklings and worldlings who had apostatized from the faith of their fathers gave a keener edge to enmity. From early times the hardest blows endured by Judaism had always been dealt by its apostate children, whose training had taught them the weakest points to assail and whose necessity of self-justification led them to attack these mercilessly. In 1085, Rabbi Samuel of Morocco came from Fez and was baptized at Toledo, when he wrote a tract[331] to justify himself which had great currency throughout the middle ages. Rabbi Moses, one of the most learned Jews of his time, who was converted in 1106, wrote a dissertation to prove that the Jews had abandoned the laws of Moses while the Christians were fulfilling them.[332] It was Nicholas de Rupella, a converted Jew, who started the long crusade against the Talmud by pointing out, in 1236, to Gregory IX the blasphemies which it contains against the Savior.[333] We have seen the troubles excited in Aragon by the disputatious Converso, Fray Pablo Christía, and he was followed by another Dominican convert, Ramon Martin, in his celebrated Pugio Fidei. In this work, which remained an authority for centuries, he piled up endless quotations from Jewish writers to prove that the race was properly reduced to servitude and he stimulated the bitterness of hatred by arguing that Jews esteemed it meritorious to slay and cheat and despoil Christians.[334]

OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS

The most prominent among the new Conversos was Selemoh Ha-Levi, a rabbi who had been the most intrepid defender of the faith and rights of his race. On the eve of the massacres, which perhaps he foresaw, and influenced by an opportune vision of the Virgin, in 1390, he professed conversion, taking the name of Pablo de Santa María, and was followed by his two brothers and five sons, founding a family of commanding influence. After a course in the University of Paris he entered the Church, rising to the see of Cartagena and then to that of Burgos, which he transmitted to his son Alfonso. At the Córtes of Toledo, in 1406, he so impressed Henry III that he was appointed tutor and governor of the Infante Juan II, Mayor of Castile and a member of the Royal Council. When, in the course of the same year, the king died he named Pablo among those who were to have the conduct and education of Juan during his minority; when the regent, Fernando of Antequera, left Castile to assume the crown of Aragon, he appointed Pablo to replace him, and the pope honored him with the position of legate a latere. In 1432, in his eighty-first year, he wrote his Scrutinium Scripturarum against his former co-religionists. It is more moderate than is customary in these controversial writings and seems to have been composed rather as a justification of his own course.[335]

Another prominent Converso was the Rabbi Jehoshua Ha-Lorqui, who took the name of Gerónimo de Santafé and founded a family almost as powerful as the Santa Marías. He too showed his zeal in the book named Hebræomastix, in which he exaggerated the errors of the Jews in the manner best adapted to excite the execration of Christians. Another leading Converso family was that of the Caballerías, of which eight brothers were baptized and one of them, Bonafos, who called himself Micer Pedro de la Caballería, wrote, in 1464, the Celo de Cristo contra los Judíos in which he treated them with customary obloquy as the synagogue of Satan and argues that the hope of Christianity lies in their ruin.[336] In thus stimulating the spirit of persecuting fanaticism we shall see how these men sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.

Meanwhile the position of the Jews grew constantly more deplorable. Decimated and impoverished, they were met by a steadily increasing temper of hatred and oppression. The massacres of 1391 had been followed by a constant stream of emigration to Granada and Portugal, which threatened to complete the depopulation of the aljamas and, with the view of arresting this, Henry III, in 1395, promised them the royal protection for the future. The worth of that promise was seen in 1406, when in Córdova the remnant of the Judería was again assailed by the mob, hundreds of Jews were slain and their houses were sacked and burnt. It is true that the king ordered the magistrates to punish the guilty and expressed his displeasure by a fine of twenty-four thousand doblas on the city, but he had, the year before, in the Córtes of 1405, assented to a series of laws depriving the Jews at once of property and of defence, by declaring void all bonds of Christians held by them, reducing to one-half all debts due to them and requiring a Christian witness and the debtor’s acknowledgement for the other half, annulling their privileges in the trial of mixed cases and requiring the hateful red circle to be worn except in travelling, when it could be laid aside in view of the murders which it invited.[337]

This was cruel enough, yet it was but a foretaste of what was in store. In 1410, when the Queen-regent Doña Catalina was in Segovia, there was revealed a sacrilegious attempt by some Jews to maltreat a consecrated host. The story was that the sacristan of San Fagun had pledged it as security for a loan—the street in which the bargain was made acquiring in consequence the name of Calle del Mal Consejo. The Jews cast it repeatedly into a boiling caldron, when it persistently arose and remained suspended in the air, a miracle which so impressed some of them that they were converted and carried the form to the Dominican convent and related the facts. The wafer was piously administered in communion to a child who died in three days. Doña Catalina instituted a vigorous investigation which implicated Don Mayr, one of the most prominent Jews in the kingdom, whose services as physician had prolonged the life of the late king. He was subjected to torture sufficient to elicit not only his participation in the sacrilege but also that he had poisoned his royal master. The convicts were drawn through the streets and quartered, as were also some others who in revenge had attempted to poison Juan de Tordesillas, the Bishop of Segovia. The Jewish synagogue was converted into the church of Corpus Christi and an annual procession still commemorates the event. San Vicente Ferrer turned it to good account, for we are told that in 1411 he almost destroyed the remnants of Judaism in the bishopric.[338]

OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS

The affair made an immense impression especially, it would seem, on San Vicente, convincing him of the advisability of forcing the Jews into the bosom of the Church by reducing them to despair. At Ayllon, in 1411, he represented to the regents the necessity of further repressive legislation and his eloquence was convincing.[339] The Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina, promulgated in 1412 and drawn up by Pablo de Santa María as Chancellor of Castile, was the result. By this rigorous measure, Jews and Moors, under savage and ruinous penalties, were not only required to wear the distinguishing badges, but to dress in coarse stuffs and not to shave or to cut the hair round. They could not change their abodes and any nobleman or gentleman receiving them on his lands was heavily fined and obliged to return them whence they came, while expatriation was forbidden under pain of slavery. Not only were the higher employments of farming the revenues, tax-collecting, and practising as physicians and surgeons forbidden, but any position in the households of the great and numerous trades, such as those of apothecaries, grocers, farriers, blacksmiths, peddlers, carpenters, tailors, barbers, and butchers. They could not carry arms or hire Christians to work in their houses or on their lands. That they should be forbidden to eat, drink or bathe with Christians, or be with them in feasts and weddings, or serve as god-parents was a matter of course under the canon law, but now even private conversation between the races was prohibited, nor could they sell provisions to Christians or keep a shop or ordinary for them. It is perhaps significant that nothing was said about usury. Money-lending was almost the only occupation remaining open, while the events of the last twenty years had left little capital wherewith to carry it on and the laws of 1405 had destroyed all sense of security in making loans. They were moreover deprived of the guarantees so long enjoyed and were subjected to the exclusive jurisdiction, civil and criminal, of the Christians.[340] They were thus debarred from the use of their skill and experience in the higher pursuits, professional and industrial, and were condemned to the lowest and rudest forms of labor; in fine, a wall was built around them from which their only escape was through the baptismal font. Fernando of Antequera carried the law in all its essentials to Aragon and King Duarte adopted it in Portugal, so that it ruled the whole Peninsula except the little kingdom of Navarre where Judaism was already almost extinct. It is significant that Fernando, in promulgating it in Majorca, alleged in justification the complaints of the inquisitors as to the social intercourse between Jews and Christians.[341]

While San Vicente and Pablo de Santa María were thus engaged in reducing to despair the Jews of Castile, the other great Converso, Gerónimo de Santafé, was laboring in a more legitimate way for their conversion in Aragon. He had been appointed physician to the Avignonese pope, Benedict XIII, who had been obliged to cross the Pyrenees, and who, on November 25, 1412, summoned the aljamas of Aragon to send, in the following January, their most learned rabbis to San Mateo, near Tortosa, for a disputation with Gerónimo on the proposition that the Messiah had come. Fourteen rabbis, selected from the synagogues of all Spain, with Vidal ben Veniste at their head, accepted the challenge. The debate opened, February 7, 1414, under the presidency of Benedict himself, who warned them that the truth of Christianity was not to be discussed but only sixteen propositions put forward by Gerónimo, thus placing them wholly on the defensive. Despite this disadvantage they held their ground tenaciously during seventy-nine sessions, prolonged through a term of twenty-one months. Gerónimo covered himself with glory by his unrivalled dialectical subtilty and exhaustless stores of learning and his triumph was shown by his producing a division between his opponents.[342]

OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS

During this colloquy, in the summer of 1413, some two hundred Jews of the synagogues of Saragossa, Calatayud and Alcañiz professed conversion. In 1414 there was a still more abundant harvest. A hundred and twenty families of Calatayud, Daroca, Fraga and Barbastro presented themselves for baptism and these were followed by the whole aljamas of Alcañiz, Caspe, Maella, Lérida, Tamarit and Alcolea, amounting to about thirty-five hundred souls. The repressive legislation was accomplishing its object and hopes were entertained that, with the aid of the inspired teaching of San Vicente, Judaism would become extinct throughout Spain.[343] To stimulate the movement by an increase of severity towards the recalcitrant, Benedict issued his constitution Etsi doctoribus gentium, in which he virtually embodied the Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina, thus giving to its system of terrible repression the sanction of Church as well as of State. He further forbade the possession of the Talmud or of any books contrary to the Christian faith, ordering the bishops and inquisitors to make semi-annual inquests of the aljamas and to proceed against all found in possession of such books. No Jew should even bind a book in which the name of Christ or the Virgin appeared. Princes were exhorted to grant them no favors or privileges and the faithful at large were commanded not to rent or sell houses to them or to hold companionship or conversation with them. Moreover they were prohibited to exercise usury and thrice a year they were to be preached to and warned to abandon their errors. The bishops in general were ordered to see to the strict enforcement of all these provisions and the execution of the bull was specially confided to Gonzalo, Bishop of Sigüenza, son of the great Converso, Pablo de Santa María. As the utterance of the Anti-pope Benedict, this searching and cruel legislation, designed to reduce the Jews to the lowest depths of poverty and despair, was current only in the lands of his obedience, but when his triumphant rival, Martin V, confirmed the charge confided to the Bishop of Sigüenza he accepted and ratified the act of Benedict.[344] Nay more; in 1434, Alfonso de Santa María, Bishop of Burgos, another son of the Converso Pablo, when a delegate to the council of Basle, procured the passage of a decree in the same sense.[345] The quarrel of the council with the papacy, it is true, deprived its utterance of œcumenic authority, but this deficiency was supplied when, in 1442, Eugenius IV issued a bull which was virtually a repetition of the law of Doña Catalina and of the constitution of Benedict XIII, while this was followed, in 1447, by an even more rigorous one of Nicholas V.[346] Thus all factions of the Church, however much they might wrangle on other points, cheerfully united in rendering the life of the Jew as miserable as possible and in forbidding princes to show him favor. This was symbolized when, in 1418, the legate of Martin V was solemnly received in Gerona and the populace, with inerring instinct, celebrated the closing of the great Schism and the reunion of the Church by playfully sacking the Judería, though the royal officials, blind to the piety of the demonstration, severely punished the perpetrators.[347]

The immediate effect of this policy corresponded to the intentions of its authors, though its ultimate results can scarce have been foreseen. The Jews were humiliated and impoverished. Despite their losses by massacre and conversion, they still formed an important portion of the population, with training and aptitudes to render service to the State but, debarred from the pursuits for which they had been fitted, they were crippled both for their own recuperation and for the benefit of the public. The economic effect was intensified by the inclusion of the Mudéjares in the repressive legislation; commerce and manufactures decayed and many products which Spain had hitherto exported she was now obliged to import at advanced prices.[348]

VICISSITUDES

On the other hand the Conversos saw opened to them a career fitted to stimulate and satisfy ambition. Confident in their powers, with intellectual training superior to that of the Christians, they aspired to the highest places in the courts, in the universities, in the Church and in the State. Wealth and power rendered them eligible suitors and they entered into matrimonial alliances with the noblest houses in the land, many of which had been impoverished by the shrinkage of the revenues derived from their Jewish subjects. Alfonso de Santa María, in procuring the decree of Basle, was careful to insert in it a recommendation of marriage between converts and Christians as the surest means of preserving the purity of the faith, and the advice was extensively followed. Thus the time soon came when there were few of the ancient nobility of Spain who were not connected, closely or remotely, with the Jew. We hear of marriages with Lunas, Mendozas, Villahermosas and others of the proudest houses.[349] As early as 1449 a petition to Lope de Barrientos, Bishop of Cuenca, by the Conversos of Toledo, enumerates all the noblest families of Spain as being of Jewish blood and among others the Henríquez, from whom the future Ferdinand the Catholic descended, through his mother Juana Henríquez.[350] It was the same in the Church, where we have seen the rank attained by the Santa Marías. Juan de Torquemada, Cardinal of San Sisto, was of Jewish descent and so, of course, was his nephew, the first inquisitor-general,[351] as was likewise Diego Deza, the second inquisitor-general, as well as Hernando de Talavera, Archbishop of Granada. It would be easy to multiply examples, for in every career the vigor and keenness of the Jews made them conspicuous and, in embracing Christianity, they seemed to be opening a new avenue for the development of the race in which it would become dominant over the Old Christians; in fact, an Italian nearly contemporary describes them as virtually ruling Spain, while secretly perverting the faith by their covert adherance to Judaism.[352] This triumph however was short-lived. Their success showed that thus far there had been no antagonism of race but only of religion. This speedily changed; the hatred and contempt which, as apostates, they lavished on the faithful sons of Israel reacted on themselves. It was impossible to stimulate popular abhorrence of the Jew without at the same time stimulating the envy and jealousy excited by the ostentation and arrogance of the New Christians. What was the use of humiliating and exterminating the Jew if these upstarts were not only to take his place in grinding the people as tax-gatherers but were to bear rule in court and camp and church?

Meanwhile the remnant of the Jews were slowly but indomitably recovering their position. It was much easier to enact the Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina than to enforce it and, like much previous legislation, it was growing obsolete in many respects. In the early days of Juan II, Abrahem Benaviste was virtually finance minister and, when the Infante Henry of Aragon seized the king at Tordesillas and carried him off, he justified the act by saying that it was because the government was in the hands of Abrahem.[353] In fact there are indications of a reaction in which the Jews were used as a counterpoise to the menacing growth of Converso influence. When, in 1442, the cruel bull of Eugenius IV was received, although it scarce contained more than the laws of 1412 and the bull of Benedict XIII, Alvaro de Luna, the all-powerful favorite, not only refused to obey it but proceeded to give legal sanction to the neglect into which those statutes had fallen. He induced his master to issue the Pragmática of Arévalo, April 6, 1443, condemning the refusal of many persons to buy or sell with Jews and Moors or to labor for them in the fields, under color of a bull of Eugenius IV, published at Toledo during his absence. Punishment is threatened for these audacities, for the bull and the laws provide that Jews and Moors and Christians shall dwell together in harmony and no one is to injure or slay them. It was not intended to prevent Jews and Moors and Christians from dealing together, nor that the former should not follow industries base and servile, such as all manner of mechanical trades, and Christians can serve them for proper wages and guard their flocks and labor for them in the fields, and they can prescribe for Christians if the medicines are compounded by Christians.[354]

Thus a revulsion had taken place in favor of the proscribed race which threatened to undo the work of Vicente Ferrer and the Conversos. It was in vain that, in 1451, Nicholas V issued another bull repeating and confirming that of Eugenius IV.[355] It received no attention and, under the protection of Alvaro de Luna, the Jews made good use of the breathing-space to reconstruct their shattered industries and to demonstrate their utility to the State. The conspiracy which sent Alvaro to the block, in 1453, was a severe blow but, on the accession of Henry IV, in 1454, they secured the good-will of his favorites and even procured the restoration of some old privileges, the most important of which was the permission to have their own judges. One element in this was the influence enjoyed by the royal physician Jacob Aben-Nuñez on whom was conferred the office of Rabb Mayor.[356] In the virtual anarchy of the period, however, when every noble was a law unto himself, it is impossible to say how far royal decrees were effective, or to postulate any general conditions. In 1458, the Constable Velasco orders his vassals of the town of Haro to observe the law forbidding Christians to labor for Jews and Moors, but he makes the wise exception that they may do so when they can find no other work wherewith to support themselves. Even under these conditions the superior energy of the non-Christian races was rapidly acquiring for them the most productive lands, if we may trust a decree of the town of Haro, in 1453, forbidding Christians to sell their estates to Moors and Jews, for if this were not stopped the Christians would have no ground to cultivate, as the Moors already held all the best of the irrigated lands.[357]

VICISSITUDES

The nobles had seen the disadvantage of the sternly oppressive laws and disregarded them to their own great benefit, thus raising the envy of the districts obliged to observe them, for the Córtes of 1462 petitioned Henry to restore liberty of trade between Christian and Jew, alleging the inconvenience caused by the restriction and the depopulation of the crown lands for, as trade was permitted in the lands of the nobles, the Jews were concentrating there. When further the Córtes asked that Jews should be permitted to return with their property and trades to the cities in the royal domains from which they had been expelled, it indicates that popular aversion was becoming directed to the Conversos rather than to the Jews.[358] It may be questioned whether it was to preserve the advantage here indicated or to gain popular favor, that the revolted nobles, in 1460, demanded of Henry that he should banish from his kingdoms all Moors and Jews who contaminated religion and corrupted morals and that, when they deposed him, in 1465, at Avila and elevated to the throne the child Alfonso, the Concordia Compromisoria which they dictated, annulled the Pragmática of Arévalo and restored to vigor the laws of 1412 and the bull of Benedict XIII. This frightened the Jews, who offered to Henry an immense sum for Gibraltar, where they proposed to establish a city of refuge, but he refused.[359]

The fright was superfluous for, in the turbulence of the time, the repressive legislation was speedily becoming obsolete. When the reforming Council of Aranda, in 1473, made but a single reference to Jews and Moors and this was merely to forbid them to pursue their industries publicly on Sundays and feast days, with a threat against the judges who, through bribery, permitted this desecration, it is fair to conclude that the law of 1412, if observed at all, was enforced only in scattered localities.[360] That the restrictions on commercial activity were obsolete is manifest from a complaint, in 1475, to the sovereigns, from the Jews of Medina del Pomar, setting forth that they had been accustomed to purchase in Bilbao, from foreign traders, cloths and other merchandise which they carried through the kingdom for sale, until recently the port had restricted all dealings with foreigners to the resident Jews, whereupon Ferdinand and Isabella ordered these regulations rescinded unless the authorities could show good reasons within fifteen days.[361]

With the settlement of affairs under Ferdinand and Isabella the position of the Jews grew distinctly worse. Although Don Abraham Senior, one of Isabella’s most trusted counsellors, was a Jew, her piety led her to revive and carry out the repressive policy of San Vicente Ferrer and, in codifying the royal edicts in the Ordenanzas Reales, confirmed by the Córtes of Toledo in 1480, all the savage legislation of 1412 was re-enacted, except that relating to mechanical trades, and the vigor of the government gave assurance that the laws would be enforced, as we have seen in the matter of the separation of the Juderías.[362] Ferdinand’s assent to this shows that he adopted the policy and, in his own dominions, by an edict of March 6, 1482, he withdrew all licenses to Jews to lay aside the dangerous badge when travelling, and he further prohibited the issuing of such licenses under penalty of a thousand florins. Another edict of December 15, 1484, recites that at Cella, a village near Teruel, some Jews had recently taken temporary residence; as there is no Judería, in order to avoid danger to souls, he orders them driven out and that none be allowed to remain more than twenty-four hours under pain of a hundred florins and a hundred lashes.[363]

DECLINE OF JUDAISM

This recrudescence of oppression probably had an influence on the people, for there came a revulsion of feeling adverse to the proscribed race, inflamed by the ceaseless labors of the frailes whose denunciatory eloquence knew no cessation. Under these circumstances the Jews and Moors seem to have had recourse to the Roman curia, always ready to speculate by selling privileges, whether it had power to grant them or not, and then to withdraw them for a consideration. We shall have ample occasion to see hereafter prolonged transactions of the kind arising from the operation of the Inquisition; those with the Jews at this time seem to have been closed by a motu proprio of May 31, 1484, doubtless procured from Sixtus IV by pressure from the sovereigns, in which the pope expresses his displeasure at learning that in Spain, especially in Andalusia, Christians, Moors and Jews dwell together; that there is no distinction of vestments, that the Christians act as servants and nurses, the Moors and Jews as physicians, apothecaries, farmers of ecclesiastical revenues etc., pretending that they hold papal privileges to that effect. Any such privileges he withdraws and he orders all officials, secular and ecclesiastical, to enforce strictly the canonical decrees respecting the proscribed races.[364] Under these impulses the municipalities, which, in 1462, had petitioned to have the prescriptive laws repealed now enforced them with renewed vigor and even exceeded them, as at Balmaseda, where the Jews were ordered to depart. They appealed to the throne, representing that they lived in daily fear for life and property and begged the royal protection, which was duly granted.[365]

Subjected to these perpetual and harassing vicissitudes, the Jews had greatly declined both in numbers and wealth. An assessment of the poll-tax, made in 1474, shows that in the dominions of Castile there were only about twelve thousand families left, or from fifty to sixty thousand souls, although there were still two hundred and sixteen separate aljamas. Their weakness and poverty are indicated by the fact that such communities as those of Seville, Toledo, Córdova, Burgos, etc., paid much less than inconspicuous places prior to 1391. The aljama of Ciudad-Real, which had paid, in 1290, a tax of 26,486 maravedís, had disappeared; the only one left in La Mancha was Almagro, assessed at 800 maravedís.[366] The work of Martínez and San Vicente Ferrer was accomplishing itself. Popular abhorrence had grown, while the importance of the Jews as a source of public revenue had fatally diminished. The end was evidently approaching, but a consideration of its horrors must be postponed while we glance at the condition of the renegades who had sought shelter from the storm by adopting the faith of the oppressor.

The Conversos, in steadily increasing numbers, had successfully worked out their destiny, accumulating honors, wealth and popular hatred. In both Castile and Aragon they filled lucrative and influential positions in the public service and their preponderance in Church and State was constantly becoming more marked. In Catalonia, however, they were regarded with contempt and, though the boast that Catalan blood was never polluted by inter-mixture is exaggerated, it is not wholly without foundation. The same is true of Valencia, where intermarriage only occurred among the rural population. Throughout Spain, moreover, the farming of all the more important sources of revenue passed into their hands and thus they inherited the odium as well as the profits of the Jews.[367]

The beginning of the end was seen at Toledo where, in 1449, Alvaro de Luna made a demand on the city for a million maravedís for the defence of the frontier and it was refused. He ordered the tax-gatherers to collect it. They were Conversos and when they made the attempt the citizens arose and sacked and burnt not only their houses but those of the Conversos in general. The latter organized in self-defence and endeavored to suppress the disturbance but were defeated, when those who were wealthy were tortured and immense booty was obtained. In vain Juan II sought to punish the city; the triumphant citizens, with the magistrates at their head, organized a court in which the question was argued whether the Conversos could hold any public office. In spite of the evident illegality of this and of active opposition led by the famous Lope de Barrientos, Bishop of Cuenca, it was decided against the Conversos in a quasi-judicial sentence, known as the Sentencia-Estatuto which, in the bitterness of its language, reveals the extreme tension existing between the Old and New Christians. The Conversos were stigmatized as more than suspect in the faith and as in reality Jews; they were declared incapable of holding office and of bearing witness against Old Christians and those who held positions were ejected.[368] The disturbances spread to Ciudad-Real, where the principal offices were held by Conversos. The Order of Calatrava, which had long endeavored to get possession of the city, espoused the side of the Old Christians; there was considerable fighting in the streets and for five days the quarter occupied by the Conversos was exposed to pillage.[369] Thus the hatred which of old had been merely a matter of religion had become a matter of race. The one could be conjured away by baptism; the other was indelible and the change was of the most serious import, exercising for centuries its sinister influence on the fate of the Peninsula.

PERSECUTION OF CONVERSOS

The Sentencia-Estatuto threatened to introduce a new principle into public and canon law, both of which had always upheld the brotherhood of Christians and had encouraged conversions by prescribing the utmost favor for converts. Nicholas V was appealed to and responded, September 24, 1449, with a bull declaring that all the faithful are one; that the laws of Alfonso X and his successors, admitting converts to all the privileges of Christians, were to be enforced and he commissioned the Archbishops of Toledo and Seville, the Bishops of Palencia, Avila and Córdova, and the Abbot of San Fagun to excommunicate all who sought to invalidate them.[370] More than this seems to have been needed and, in 1450, he formally excommunicated Pedro Sarmiento and his accomplices as the authors of the Sentencia-Estatuto and again, in 1451, he repeated his bull of 1449. Finally, in the same year the synods of Vitoria and Alcalá condemned it and Alfonso de Montalvo, the foremost jurist of the time, pronounced it to be illegal.[371] It never, in fact, was of binding force, but the effort made to set it aside shows how dangerous a menace it was and how it expressed a widespread public opinion. It was the first fitful gust of the tornado.

Toledo remained the hot-bed of disturbance. In 1461 the martial Archbishop, Alonso Carrillo commissioned the learned Alonso de Oropesa, General of the Geronimites to investigate the cause of dissension. He did so and reported that there were faults on both sides and, at the request of the archbishop, he proceeded to write his Lumen ad Revelationem Gentium to prove the unity of the faithful, but, while he was engaged in this pious labor the inextinguishable feud broke out afresh.[372] Any chance disturbance might bring this about and the opportunity was furnished in 1467, when the canons, who enjoyed a revenue based on the bread of the town of Maqueda, farmed it out to a Jew. Alvaro Gómez, an alcalde mayor, was lord of Maqueda; his alcaide beat the Jew and seized the bread for the use of the castle; the canons promptly imprisoned the alcaide and summoned Gómez to answer. When he came the quarrel grew bitterer; the Count of Cifuentes, leader of one of the factions of the city and protector of the Conversos, espoused the cause of Gómez, while Fernando de la Torre, a leader of the Conversos, hoping to revenge the defeat of 1449, boasted that he had at command four thousand well-armed fighting men, being six times more than the Old Christians could muster. Matters were ripe for an explosion and, on July 21st, at a conference held in the cathedral, the followers of the two parties taunted each other beyond endurance; swords were drawn and blood polluted the sanctuary, though only one man was slain. The canons proceeded to fortify and garrison the cathedral, which was attacked the next day. The clergy, galled by the fire of the assailants, to create a diversion, started a conflagration in the calle de la Chapineria, which spread until eight streets were destroyed—the richest in Toledo, crowded with shops full of costly merchandise. The device was successful; the Conversos were disheartened and lost ground till, on the 29th, Cifuentes and Gómez fled, while Fernando de la Torre and his brother Alvaro were captured and hanged. The triumphant faction removed from office all their opponents and revived with additional rigor the Sentencia-Estatuto. Toledo at the time belonged to the party of the pretender Alfonso XII but, when the citizens sent to him to confirm what they had done, he refused and the city soon afterwards transferred its allegiance to Henry IV.[373] It is quite probable that, in reward for this, he confirmed the Sentencia-Estatuto for when, about the same time, Ciudad-Real revolted from Alfonso and adhered to Henry, he granted, July 14, 1468, to that city that thenceforward no Converse should hold municipal office.[374] In the all-pervading lawlessness such disturbances as those of Toledo met with neither repression nor punishment. In 1470 Valladolid saw a similar tumult, in which the Old Christians and Conversos flew to arms and struggled for mastery. The former sent for Ferdinand and Isabella who came, but the majority of the citizens preferred Henry IV and the royal pair were glad to escape.[375]

PERSECUTION OF CONVERSOS

Everywhere the hatred between the Old Christians and the New was manifesting itself in this deplorable fashion. In Córdova we are told that the Conversos were very rich and had bought not only the offices but the protection of Alonso de Aguilar, whose power and high reputation commanded universal respect, while the Old Christians ranged themselves under the Counts of Cabra and the Bishop, Pedro de Córdova y Solier. Only a spark was needed to produce an explosion and an accident during a, procession, March 14, 1473, furnished the occasion. With shouts of viva la fe de Dios the mob arose and pillage, murder and fire were let loose upon the city. Alonso and his brother Gonsalvo—the future Great Captain—quelled the riot at the cost of no little bloodshed, but it burst forth again a few days later and, after a combat lasting forty-eight hours the Aguilars were forced to take refuge in the alcázar carrying with them such Conversos and Jews as they could. Then followed a general sack in which every kind of outrage and cruelty was perpetrated, until the fury of the mob was exhausted by the lack of victims. Finally Alonso came to terms with the city authorities, who banished the Conversos for ever and such poor wretches as had escaped torch and dagger were thrust forth to be robbed and murdered with impunity on the highways.[376]

Laborers from the country, who chanced to be in Córdova, carried the welcome news to neighboring places and the flame passed swiftly through Andalusia from town to town. Baena was kept quiet by the Count of Cabra, Palma by Luis Portocarrero, Ecija by Fadrique Manrique and Seville and Jerez by Juan de Guzman and Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, but elsewhere the havoc was terrible. At Jaen, the Constable of Castile, Miguel Luis de Iranzo, was treacherously murdered while kneeling before the altar; his wife, Teresa de Torres, was barely able to escape, with her children, to the alcázar, and the Conversos were plundered and dispatched. Only at Almodovar del Campo do we hear of any justice executed on the assassins, for there Rodrigo Giron, Master of Calatrava, hanged some of the most culpable. The king, we are told, when the news was brought to him, grieved much, but inflicted no punishment.[377]

On the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1474, a Converso of Córdova, Anton de Montoro, addressed to them a poem in which he gives a terrible picture of the murders committed with impunity on his brethren, whose purity of faith he asserts. Fire and sword had just ravaged the aljama of Carmona and fresh disasters were threatening at Seville and Córdova.[378] Dominicans and Franciscans were thundering from the pulpits and were calling on the faithful to purify the land from the pollution of Judaism, secret and open. It was commonly asserted and believed that the Christianity of the Conversos was fictitious, and fanaticism joined with envy and greed in stimulating the massacres that had become so frequent. The means adopted to win over the Jewish converts had not been so gentle as to encourage confidence in the sincerity of their professions and, rightly or wrongly, they were almost universally suspected. The energy with which the new sovereigns enforced respect for the laws speedily put an end to the hideous excesses of the mob, for we hear of no further massacres, but the abhorrence entertained for the successful renegades, whose wealth and power were regarded as obtained by false profession of belief in Christ, was still wide-spread, though its more violent manifestations were restrained. Wise forbearance, combined with vigorous maintenance of order, would in time have brought about reconciliation, to the infinite benefit of Spain, but at a time when heresy was regarded as the greatest of crimes and unity of faith as the supreme object of statesmanship, wise forbearance and toleration were impossible. After suppressing turbulence the sovereigns therefore felt that there was still a duty before them to vindicate the faith. Thus, after long hesitation, their policy with regard to the Conversos was embodied in the Inquisition, introduced towards the end of 1480. The Jewish question required different treatment and it was solved, once for all, in most decisive fashion.

EXPULSION OF JEWS CONSIDERED

The Inquisition had no jurisdiction over the Jew, unless he rendered himself amenable to it by some offence against the faith. He was not baptized; he was not a member of the Church and therefore was incapable of heresy, which was the object of inquisitional functions. He might, however, render himself subject to it by proselytism, by seducing Christians to embrace his errors, and this was constantly alleged against Jews, although their history shows that, unlike the other great religions, Judaism has ever been a national faith with no desire to spread beyond the boundaries of the race. As the chosen people, Israel has never sought to share its God with the Gentiles. There was more foundation, probably, in the accusation that the secret perversity of the Conversos was encouraged by those who had remained steadfast in the faith, that circumcisions were secretly performed and that contributions to the synagogues were welcomed.

While the object of the Inquisition was to secure the unity of faith, its founding destroyed the hope that ultimately the Jews would all be gathered into the fold of Christ. This had been the justification of the inhuman laws designed to render existence outside of the Church so intolerable that baptism would be sought as a relief from endless injustice, but the awful spectacle of the autos de fe and the miseries attendant on wholesale confiscations led the Jew to cherish more resolutely than ever the ancestral faith which served him as shield from the terrors of the Holy Office and the dreadful fate ever impending over the Conversos. His conversion could no longer be hoped for and, so long as he remained in Spain, the faithful would be scandalized by his presence and the converts would be exposed to the contamination of his society. The only alternative was his removal.

Isabella tried a partial experiment of this kind in 1480, apparently to supplement the Inquisition, founded about the same time. Andalusia was the province where the Jews were most numerous and she commenced by ordering the expulsion from there of all who would not accept Christianity and threatening with death any new settlers.[379] We have no details as to this measure and only know that it was several times postponed and that it was apparently abandoned.[380] A bull of Sixtus IV, in 1484, shows us that Jews were still dwelling there undisturbed and, when the final expulsion took place in 1492, Bernaldez informs us that from Andalusia eight thousand households embarked at Cadiz, besides many at Cartagena and the ports of Aragon.[381]

That there was vacillation is highly probable, for policy and fanaticism were irreconcilable. The war with Granada was calling for large expenditures, to which the Jews were most useful contributors and the finances were in the hands of two leading Jews, Abraham Senior and Isaac Abravanel, to whose skilful management its ultimate success was largely due. It may be that the threatened expulsion was rather a financial than a religious measure, adopted with a view of selling suspensions and exemptions, and this may also perhaps explain a similar course adopted by Ferdinand when, in May, 1486, he ordered the inquisitors of Aragon to banish all Jews of Saragossa from the archbishopric of Saragossa and the bishopric of Albarracin, in the same way as they had been banished from the sees of Seville, Córdova and Jaen.[382] The sovereigns knew when to be tolerant and when to give full rein to fanaticism, as was evinced in their treatment of renegades and Conversos at the capture of Málaga as contrasted with the liberal terms offered in the capitulations of Almería and Granada. They were prepared to listen to the counsel of those who opposed all interference with the Jewish population, in whose favor there were powerful influences at work. Isabella apparently hesitated long between statesmanship and her conceptions of duty, while Torquemada never ceased to urge upon her the service to be rendered to Christ by clearing her dominions of the descendants of his crucifiers.[383]

STIMULATION OF PREJUDICE

There was no lack of effort to inflame public opinion and to excite still further the hostility so long and so carefully cultivated. A story had wide circulation that Maestre Ribas Altas, the royal physician, wore a golden ball attached to a cord around his neck; that Prince Juan, only son of the sovereigns, begged it of him and managed to open it, when he found inside a parchment on which was painted a crucifix with the physician in an indecent attitude; that he was so affected that he fell sick and, after much persuasion, revealed the cause, adding that he would not recover until the Jew was burnt, which was accordingly done and Ferdinand consented to the expulsion of the accursed sect.[384] Then we are told that, on Good Friday, 1488, some Jews, to avenge an insult, stoned a rude cross which stood on the hill of Gano near Casar de Palomero; they were observed and denounced, when the Duke of Alba burnt the rabbi and several of the culprits; the cross was repaired and carried in solemn procession to the parish church, where it still remains an object of popular veneration.[385] It is to this period also that we may presumably refer the fabrication of a correspondence, discovered fifty years later among the archives of Toledo by Archbishop Siliceo, between Chamorro, Prince of the Jews of Spain and Uliff, Prince of those of Constantinople, in which the latter, replying to a request for counsel, tells the former “as the king takes your property, make your sons merchants that they may take the property of the Christians; as he takes your lives, make your sons physicians and apothecaries, that they may take Christian lives; as he destroys your synagogues, make your sons ecclesiastics, that they may destroy the churches; as he vexes you in other ways, make your sons officials, that they may reduce the Christians to subjection and take revenge.”[386]

The most effective device, however, was a cruel one, carried out by Torquemada unshrinkingly to the end. In June, 1490, a Converso named Benito García, on his return from a pilgrimage to Compostella, was arrested at Astorga on the charge of having a consecrated wafer in his knapsack. The episcopal vicar, Dr. Pedro de Villada, tortured him repeatedly till he obtained a confession implicating five other Conversos and six Jews in a plot to effect a conjuration with a human heart and a consecrated host, whereby to cause the madness and death of all Christians, the destruction of Christianity and the triumph of Judaism. Three of the implicated Jews were dead, but the rest of those named were promptly arrested and the trial was carried on by the Inquisition. After another year spent in torturing the accused, there emerged the story of the crucifixion at La Guardia of a Christian child, whose heart was cut out for the purpose of the conjuration. The whole tissue was so evidently the creation of the torture-chamber that it was impossible to reconcile the discrepancies in the confessions of the accused, although the very unusual recourse of confronting them was tried several times; no child had anywhere been missed and no remains were found on the spot where it was said to have been buried. The inquisitors finally abandoned the attempt to frame a consistent narrative and, on November 16, 1491, the accused were executed at Avila; the three deceased Jews were burned in effigy, the two living ones were torn with red-hot pincers and the Conversos were “reconciled” and strangled before burning. The underlying purpose was revealed in the sentence read at the auto de fe, which was framed so as to bring into especial prominence the proselyting efforts of the Jews and the Judaizing propensities of the Conversos and no effort was spared to produce the widest impression on the people. We happen to know that the sentence was sent to La Guardia, to be read from the pulpit, and that it was translated into Catalan and similarly published in Barcelona, showing that it was thus brought before the whole population—a thing without parallel in the history of the Inquisition. The cult of the Saint-Child of La Guardia—El santo niño de la Guardia—was promptly started with miracles and has been kept up to the present day, although the sanctity of the supposed martyr has never been confirmed by the Holy See. Torquemada’s object was gained for, though it would be too much to say that this alone won Ferdinand’s consent to the expulsion, it undoubtedly contributed largely to that result. The edict of expulsion, it is true, makes no direct reference to the case but, in its labored efforts to magnify the dangers of Jewish proselytism it reflects distinctly the admissions extorted from the accused by the Inquisition.[387]

EXPULSION OF THE JEWS

With the surrender of Granada in January, 1492, the work of the Reconquest was accomplished. The Jews had zealously contributed to it and had done their work too well. With the accession of a rich territory and an industrious Moorish population and the cessation of the drain of the war, even Ferdinand might persuade himself that the Jews were no longer financially indispensable. The popular fanaticism required constant repression to keep the peace; the operations of the Inquisition destroyed the hope that gradual conversion would bring about the desired unity of faith and the only alternative was the removal of those who could not, without a miraculous change of heart, be expected to encounter the terrible risks attendant upon baptism. It is easy thus to understand the motives leading to the measure, without attributing it, as has been done, to greed for the victims’ wealth, for though, as we shall see, there are abundant evidences of a desire to profit by it, as a whole it was palpably undesirable financially.

Thus the expulsion of the Jews from all the Spanish dominions came to be resolved upon. When this was bruited about the court, Abraham Senior and Abravanel offered a large sum from the aljamas to avert the blow. Ferdinand was inclined to accept it, but Isabella was firm. The story is current that, when the offer was under consideration, Torquemada forced his way into the royal presence and holding aloft a crucifix boldly addressed the sovereigns: “Behold the crucified whom the wicked Judas sold for thirty pieces of silver. If you approve that deed, sell him for a greater sum. I resign my power; nothing shall be imputed to me but you will answer to God!”[388] Whether this be true or not, the offer was rejected and, on March 30th, the edict of expulsion was signed, though apparently there was delay in its promulgation, for it was not published in Barcelona until May 1st.[389] It gave the entire Jewish population of Spain until July 31st in which to change their religion or to leave the country, under penalty of death, which was likewise threatened for any attempt to return. During the interval they were taken under the royal protection; they were permitted to sell their effects and carry the proceeds with them, except that, under a general law, the export of gold and silver was prohibited.[390]

A supplementary edict of May 14th granted permission to sell lands, leaving but little time in which to effect such transactions and this was still more fatally limited in Aragon, where Ferdinand sequestrated all Jewish property in order to afford claimants and creditors the opportunity to prove their rights, the courts being ordered to decide all such cases promptly. Still less excusable was his detaining from all sales an amount equal to all the charges and taxes which the Jews would have paid him, thus realizing a full year’s revenue from the trifling sums obtained through forced sales by the unhappy exiles.[391] In Castile, the inextricable confusion arising from the extensive commercial transactions of the Jews led to the issue, May 30th, of a decree addressed to all the officials of the land, ordering all interested parties to be summoned to appear within twenty days to prove their claims, which the courts must settle by the middle of July. All debts falling due prior to the date of departure were to be promptly paid; if due to Christians by Jews who had not personal effects sufficient to satisfy them, the creditors were to take land at an appraised valuation or be paid out of other debts paid by Jews. For debts falling due subsequently, if due by Jews, the debtors had to pay at once or furnish adequate security; if due by Christians or Moors, the creditors were either to leave powers to collect at maturity or to sell the claims to such purchasers as they could find.[392] These regulations afford us a glimpse into the complexities arising from the convulsion thus suddenly precipitated and, as the Jews were almost universally creditors, we can readily imagine how great were their losses and how many Christian debtors must have escaped payment.

EXPULSION OF THE JEWS

The sovereigns also shared in the spoils. When the exiles reached the seaports to embark they found that an export duty of two ducats per head had been levied upon them, which they were obliged to pay out of their impoverished store.[393] Moreover, the threat of confiscation for those who overstayed the time was rigorously enforced and, in some cases at least, the property thus seized was granted to nobles to compensate their losses by the banishment of their Jews.[394] All effects left behind also were seized; in many cases the dangers of the journey, the prohibition to carry coin and the difficulty of procuring bills of exchange, led the exiles to make deposits with trustworthy friends to be remitted to them in their new homes, all of which was seized by the crown. The amount of this was sufficient to require a regular organization of officials deputed to hunt up these deposits and other fragments of property that could be escheated, and we find correspondence on the subject as late as 1498.[395] Efforts were even also made to follow exiles and secure their property on the plea that they had taken with them prohibited articles, and Henry VII of England and Ferdinand of Naples were appealed to for assistance in cases of this description.[396]

The terror and distress of the exodus, we are told, were greatly increased by an edict issued by Torquemada, as inquisitor-general, in April, forbidding any Christian, after August 9th, from holding any communication with Jews, or giving them food or shelter, or aiding them in any way.[397] Such addition to their woes was scarce necessary, for it would be difficult to exaggerate the misery inflicted on a population thus suddenly uprooted from a land in which their race was older than that of their oppressors. Stunned at first by the blow, as soon as they rallied from the shock, they commenced preparations for departure. An aged rabbi, Isaac Aboab, with thirty prominent colleagues, was commissioned to treat with João II of Portugal for refuge in his dominions. He drove a hard bargain, demanding a cruzado a head for permission to enter and reside for six months.[398] For those who were near the coasts, arrangements were made for transhipment by sea, mostly from Cadiz and Barcelona on the south and Laredo on the north. To the north-east, Navarre afforded an asylum, by order of Jean d’Albret and his wife Leonora, although the cities were somewhat recalcitrant.[399] As the term approached, two days’ grace were allowed, bringing it to August 2d, the 9th of Ab, a day memorable in Jewish annals for its repeated misfortunes.[400]

The sacrifices entailed on the exiles were enormous. To realize in so limited a time on every species of property not portable, with means of transportation so imperfect, was almost impossible and, in a forced sale of such magnitude, the purchasers had a vast advantage of which they fully availed themselves. An eye-witness tells us that the Christians bought their property for a trifle; they went around and found few buyers, so that they were compelled to give a house for an ass and a vineyard for a little cloth or linen: in some places the miserable wretches, unable to get any price, burnt their homes and the aljamas bestowed the communal property on the cities. Their synagogues they were not allowed to sell, the Christians taking them and converting them into churches, wherein to worship a God of justice and love.[401] The cemeteries, for which they felt peculiar solicitude, were in many places made over to the cities, on condition of preservation from desecration and use only for pasturage; where this was not done they were confiscated and Torquemada obtained a fragment of the spoil by securing, March 23, 1494, from Ferdinand and Isabella, the grant of that of Avila for his convent of Santo Tomas.[402]

EXPULSION OF THE JEWS

The resolute constancy displayed in this extremity was admirable. There were comparatively few renegades and, if Abraham Senior was one of them, it is urged in extenuation that Isabella, who was loath to lose his services, threatened, if he persisted in his faith, to adopt still sharper measures against his people and he, knowing her capacity in this direction, submitted to baptism; he and his family had for god-parents the sovereigns and Cardinal González de Mendoza; they assumed the name of Coronel which long remained distinguished.[403] The frailes exerted themselves everywhere in preaching, but the converts were few and only of the lowest class; the Inquisition had changed the situation and San Vicente Ferrer himself would have found missionary work unfruitful, for the dread of exile was less than that of the Holy Office and the quemadero.

There was boundless mutual helpfulness; the rich aided the poor and they made ready as best they could to face the perils of the unknown future. Before starting, all the boys and girls over twelve were married. Early in July the exodus commenced and no better idea of this pilgrimage of grief can be conveyed than by the simple narrative of the good cura of Palacios. Disregarding, he says, the wealth they left behind and confiding in the blind hope that God would lead them to the promised land, they left their homes, great and small, old and young, on foot, on horseback, on asses or other beasts or in wagons, some falling, others rising, some dying, others being born, others falling sick. There was no Christian who did not pity them; everywhere they were invited to conversion and some were baptized, but very few, for the rabbis encouraged them and made the women and children play on the timbrel. Those who went to Cadiz hoped that God would open a path for them across the sea; but they stayed there many days, suffering much and many wished that, they had never been born. From Aragon and Catalonia they put to sea for Italy or the Moorish lands or whithersoever fortune might drive them. Most of them had evil fate, robbery and murder by sea and in the lands of their refuge. This is shown by the fate of those who sailed from Cadiz. They had to embark in twenty-five ships of which the captain was Pero Cabron; they sailed for Oran where they found the corsair Fragoso and his fleet; they promised him ten thousand ducats not to molest them, to which he agreed, but night came on and they sailed for Arcilla. (a Spanish settlement in Morocco), where a tempest scattered them. Sixteen ships put into Cartagena, where a hundred and fifty souls landed and asked for baptism; then the fleet went to Málaga, where four hundred more did the same. The rest reached Arcilla and went to Fez. Multitudes also sailed from Gibraltar to Arcilla, whence they set out for Fez, under guard of Moors hired for the purpose, but they were robbed on the journey and their wives and daughters were violated. Many returned to Arcilla, where the new arrivals, on hearing of this, remained, forming a large camp. Then they divided into two parties, one persisting in going to Fez, the other preferring baptism at Arcilla, where the commandant, the Count of Boron, treated them kindly and the priests baptized them in squads with sprinklers. The count sent them back to Spain and, up to 1496, they were returning for baptism—in Palacios, Bernaldez baptized as many as a hundred, some of them being rabbis. Those who reached Fez were naked and starving and lousy. The king, seeing them a burden, permitted them to return and they straggled back to Arcilla, robbed and murdered on the road, the women violated and the men often cut open in search of gold thought to be concealed in their stomachs. Those who remained in Fez built a great Jewry for themselves of houses of straw; one night it took fire, burning all their property and fifty or a hundred souls—after which came a pestilence, carrying off more than four thousand. Ferdinand and Isabella, seeing that all who could get back returned for baptism, set guards to keep them out unless they had money to support themselves.[404]

The whole world was pitiless to these wretched outcasts, against whom every man’s hand was raised. Those who sought Portugal utilized the six months allotted to them by sending a party to Fez to arrange for transit there; many went and formed part of the luckless band whose misfortunes we have seen. Others remained, the richer paying the king a hundred cruzados per household, the poorer eight cruzados a head, while a thousand, who could pay nothing, were enslaved. These King Manoel emancipated, on his accession in 1495, but in 1497 he enforced conversion on all. Then in Lisbon, at Easter, 1506, a New Christian in a Dominican church, chanced to express a doubt as to a miraculous crucifix, when he was dragged out by the hair and slain; the Dominicans harangued the mob, parading the streets with the crucifix and exciting popular passion till a massacre ensued in which the most revolting cruelties were perpetrated. It raged for three days and ended only when no more victims could be found, the number of slain being estimated at several thousand.[405] The further fate of these refugees we shall have occasion to trace hereafter.

FATE OF THE EXILES

In Navarre, where the exiles had been kindly received, the era of toleration was brief. In 1498, an edict, based on that of Ferdinand and Isabella, gave them the alternative of baptism or expulsion and, at the same time, such difficulties were thrown in the way of exile that they mostly submitted to baptism and remained a discredited class, subjected to numerous disabilities.[406] Naples, whither numbers flocked, afforded an inhospitable refuge. In August, 1492, nine caravels arrived there, loaded with Jews and infected with pestilence, which they communicated to the city, whence it spread through the kingdom and raged for a year, causing a mortality of twenty thousand. Then, in the confusion following the invasion of Charles VIII, in 1495, the people rose against them; many abandoned their religion to escape slaughter or slavery; many were carried off to distant lands and sold as slaves; this tribulation lasted for three years, during which those who were steadfast in the faith were imprisoned or burnt or exposed to the caprices of the mob.[407] Turkey, on the whole, proved the most satisfactory refuge, where Bajazet found them such profitable subjects that he ridiculed the wisdom popularly ascribed to the Spanish sovereigns who could commit so great an act of folly. Though exposed to occasional persecution, they continued to flourish; most of the existing Jews of Turkey in Europe and a large portion of those of Turkey in Asia, are descendants of the exiles; they absorbed the older communities and their language is still the Spanish of the sixteenth century.[408]

When the fate of the exiles was, for the most part, so unendurable, it was natural that many should seek to return to their native land and, as we have seen from Bernaldez, large numbers did so. At first this was tacitly permitted, on condition of conversion, provided they brought money with them, but the sovereigns finally grew fearful that the purity of the faith would be impaired and, in 1499, an explanatory edict was issued, decreeing death and confiscation for any Jew entering Spain, whether a foreigner or returning exile, even if he asked for baptism, unless beforehand he sent word that he wished to come for that purpose, when he was to be baptized at the port of entry and a notarial act was to be taken. That this savage edict was pitilessly enforced is manifested by several cases in 1500 and 1501. Moreover, all masters of Jewish slaves were ordered to send them out of the country within two months, unless they would submit to baptism.[409] Spain was too holy a land to be polluted with the presence of a Jew, even in captivity.

In the absence of trustworthy statistics, all estimates of the number of victims must be more or less a matter of guess-work and consequently they vary with the impressions or imagination of the annalist. Bernaldez informs us that Rabbi Mair wrote to Abraham Senior that the sovereigns had banished 35,000 vassals, that is, 35,000 Jewish households, and he adds that, of the ten or twelve rabbis whom he baptized on their return, a very intelligent one, named Zentollo of Vitoria, told him that there were in Castile more than 30,000 married Jews and 6000 in the kingdoms of Aragon, making 160,000 souls when the edict was issued, which is probably as nearly correct an estimate as we can find.[410] With time the figures grew. Albertino, Inquisitor of Valencia, in 1534, quotes Reuchlin as computing the number of exiles at 420,000.[411] The cautious Zurita quotes Bernaldez and adds that others put the total at 400,000, while Mariana tells us that most authors assert the number of households to have been 170,000, and some put the total at 800,000 souls; Páramo quotes the figures of 124,000 households or over 600,000 souls.[412] Isidore Loeb, after an exhaustive review of all authorities, Jewish and Christian, reaches the estimate[413]—

Emigrants,	165,000
Baptized,	50,000
Died,	20,000
	235,000

and this, in view of the diminished number of Jews, as shown by the Repartimiento of 1474 (p. 125) is probably too large an estimate.

CONTEMPORARY OPINION

Whatever may have been the number, the sum of human misery was incomputable. Rabbi Joseph, whose father was one of the exiles, eloquently describes the sufferings of his race: “For some of them the Turks killed to take out the gold which they had swallowed to hide it; some of them hunger and the plague consumed and some of them were cast naked by the captains on the isles of the sea; and some of them were sold for men-servants and maid-servants in Genoa and its villages and some of them were cast into the sea. … For there were among those who were cast into the isles of the sea upon Provence a Jew and his old father fainting from hunger, begging bread, for there was no one to break unto him in a strange country. And the man went and sold his son for bread to restore the soul of the old man. And it came to pass, when he returned to his old father, that he found him fallen down dead and he rent his clothes. And he returned unto the baker to take his son and the baker would not give him back and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry for his son and there was none to deliver.”[414] Penniless, friendless and despised they were cast forth into a world which had been taught that to oppress them was a service to the Redeemer.

Yet such were the convictions of the period, in the fifteenth century after Christ had died for man, that this crime against humanity met with nothing but applause among contemporaries. Men might admit that it was unwise from the point of view of statesmanship and damaging to the prosperity of the land, but this only enhanced the credit due to the sovereigns whose piety was equal to the sacrifice. When, in 1495, Alexander VI granted to them the proud title of Catholic Kings, the expulsion of the Jews was enumerated among the services to the faith entitling them to this distinction.[415] Even so liberal and cultured a thinker as Gian Pico della Mirandola, praises them for it, while he admits that even Christians were moved to pity by the calamities of the sufferers, nearly all of whom were consumed by shipwreck, pestilence and hunger, rendering the destruction equal to that inflicted by Titus and Hadrian.[416] It is true that Machiavelli, faithful to his general principles, seeks to find in Ferdinand’s participation a political rather than a religious motive, but even he characterizes the act as a pietosa crudeltà.[417] So far, indeed, was it from being a cruelty, in the eyes of the theologians of the period, that Ferdinand was held to have exercised his power mercifully, for Arnaldo Albertino proved by the canon law that he would have been fully justified in putting them all to the sword and seizing their property.[418]

The Edict of Expulsion proclaimed to the world the policy which in its continuous development did so much for the abasement of Spain. At the same time it closed the career of avowed Jews in the Spanish dominions. Henceforth we shall meet with them as apostate Christians, the occasion and the victims of the Inquisition.