The Inquisitions in the Iberian peninsula relied on unpaid lay agents, called familiares, to identify those suspected of beliefs or practices that deviated from Catholicism, and also encouraged people to inform on their neighbors or acquaintances. This created a climate of suspicion in some areas, as people reported on those whose ideas or behavior seemed odd, which they often attributed to being "New Christian" whether or not it had any relationship to Jewish or Muslim traditions. In this Portuguese inquisitor's report, a woman describes two chance encounters, one involving an insult and another a discussion of burial practices.
And following this on the fifth day of the month of June of 1542 years, in Lisbon.
Isabel Fernandez, wife of Pero Reinel, who makes navigation charts, who lives in this city at the entrance way to the Misericordia at the rear of the terrace for old wheat, in the parish of See, was asked and testified under oath on the Bible if she knows of any person or persons who have said or done something against our holy Catholic faith. She said that she did not know anything else except that in this last Lent, she was going to the customs house and passing through the square of Pelourinho Velho, where items are sold at auction. They were selling some tavoleiros [special tins for baking cookies] and some women were buying the said tavoleiros. They placed a bid on them and a porter who was auctioning them, who is named Remedeo, carried the said tavoleiros to them to look at. They took them in their hands and were looking at them and were not pleased with them and left them. So then the said Remedeo told them, in a harsh voice: "These are the women who took the virginity from God!" Then she [the witness] left and afterwards encountered the said porter and reprimanded him for having spoken those words. He said that he was joking, and she [the
Witness] said that she does not know if the said Remedeo is a New Christian or an Old, and yet that he appeared to be a New Christian. [She said] that there were many people present who she did not know nor did she know the women who took the said tavoleiros for it happened that she was passing by and heard the above mentioned and no more. Antonio Roiz [a secretary for the Inquisition] wrote it with the two marks that were made in truth and requested me the notary that I sign for her for [she] does not know how to write.
She [the witness] said further that it was true that seven or eight months ago, more or less, a certain Isabel Fernandez, New Christian, a widowed woman who sold olive oil in the Feraria, came to her house one day. She started to talk, and she [the witness] asked her why when the New Christians were dead they were laid in [new] virgin graves, because the Old Christians rejoiced that the earth that ate their father and mother and grandparents would eat them. [In other words, that they were buried in the same ground with the rest of their family] The said Isabel Fernandez retorted that she was astonished and did not know that, and that the reason the New Christians did that was because if they lay in graves where other dead had already been, all the sins of those who were buried there would be transmitted to them. She [the witness] replied to her by saying that this was the blindness in which they lived, and then said no more.
(Francisco Sousa Viterbo, ed., Trabalhos nauticos dos portuguezes nos seculos XVI e XVII, Part I [Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1898 (facsimile, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa Moeda, 1988), p. 377 (341)]. Translated by Darlene Abreu-Ferreira in Monica Chojnacka and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, eds., Ages of Woman, Ages of Man: Sources in European Social History, 1400-1750 [London: Longman, 2002], pp. 184-5. Reprinted by permission.)
The conquest of Granada brought Muslims as well as Jews into Christian Spanish territory, of course. Initially Isabella and Ferdinand promised Muslims they could practice their faith, but this toleration was short-lived, and forced conversions began. Muslims in Granada rebelled in 1499, a revolt put down by force; at least 50,000 Muslims in Granada were baptized en masse, all Muslims in Castile were ordered to convert or leave, and Arabic-language writings relating to Islam were burned. Many Muslims, along with Jews, went to the Ottoman Empire, where they were welcomed by the sultan. Others converted, becoming Moriscos, another type of “New Christian” whose sincerity in conversion was often doubted by Christian authorities. The Inquisition had jurisdiction over those suspected of Muslim practices as well as Jewish. Men and women who were observed fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, performing daily prayers or washing themselves in a Muslim manner, wearing Muslim dress, carrying Arabic books or amulets, following Muslim funeral practices, or engaging in other suspicious activities were arrested, imprisoned, questioned, subjected to rituals of public humiliation, and occasionally executed at autos da fe. Officials recommended that children, especially boys, be taken from their parents and educated in Christian schools.
Increased oppression led to another revolt in 1567. It took several years to subdue the rebels, after which King Philip II ordered all Moriscos in Granada to be dispersed throughout Castile, where they could be more easily watched by Christian authorities. Those who had taken direct part in the rebellion, including women and children, were subject to enslavement. This forced relocation created great hardships for Moriscos, and in many cases it increased, rather than decreased, their allegiance to their traditional cultural and religious practices.
In 1609, King Philip III began a series of decrees ordering Moriscos to leave all of Spain; those going to the “infidel lands” of the Ottoman Empire or North Africa were ordered to leave behind any children under the age of seven, turning them over to church officials or Old Christian families. More than 300,000 Moriscos left Spain during the period from 1609 to 1614, though slaves in Christian households, women who had married Christians, people who had taken monastic vows, and some tenants of Christian landowners were allowed to stay. It is impossible to know how many children were separated from their families, though strict rules set on their upbringing imply that there must have been a significant number. Morisco children were not supposed to be enslaved, but raised as good Christians by the families that took them in, and married to Old Christians whenever possible. Boys were not to be taught any trade in which they would need to read or use weapons, however, and children of both sexes had to repent their religious errors before the Inquisition. Royal and church policies thus simultaneously promoted the assimilation of the remaining Moriscos into Christian society and their continued distinctiveness as a group tainted by their heritage.
For their purging Spain of Jews and Muslims, and their military assistance in defending the Papal States, Pope Alexander VI gave Ferdinand and Isabella the title “Most Catholic Majesties.” He also gave them, more importantly, the right to appoint bishops and retain much church revenue. Thus by being “most Catholic,” Isabella and Ferdinand and their successors gained power over the church that other rulers would only gain by breaking with Rome.
Though in the short term Isabella and Ferdinand’s marital politics were disrupted by death, in the long run at least one part of them was extremely successful. In 1516, with Ferdinand’s death, the thrones to both Castile and Aragon were inherited by their grandson Charles, the son of their daughter Joanna and Philip of Habsburg, who became Charles I of Spain. With this, Charles gained a triple dynastic inheritance, as he already ruled the Low Countries and Habsburg holdings in central Europe. In 1519, at the age of nineteen, he was elected Holy Roman Emperor. (There had already been four emperors named Charles, so as emperor he was Charles V.) Charles married
Isabella of Portugal, his cousin and sister-in-law, who served as his main representative in Spain when he was elsewhere in his realm, which was often.
Charles’s vast holdings were split apart at his abdication in 1556, and his eldest son,
Philip II, inherited the throne of Spain. Philip continued his great-grandparents’ policies of expansion, invading and conquering the islands that became known as the Philippines in 1565 and, during a succession controversy in which he was one claimant to the throne, Portugal in 1580. He also inherited their zeal for religious uniformity, and the Inquisition tried and executed suspected Protestants as well as converses and Moriscos. These policies led, as we have seen, to a revolt by Moriscos in Granada, and, as we will see in chapter 5 , to a revolt in the Netherlands. Both Charles and Philip fought wars against France, the Ottoman Empire, and other European powers; Philip was at peace for at most six months of his forty-two-year reign. Wars sucked the royal treasury nearly dry of all the gold and silver pouring in from the Americas. American precious metals, higher taxes, loans, and the sale of offices could not cover the costs of the army and the ever-expanding bureaucracy in Spain, and Philip was bankrupt by the time of his death in 1598.
World History
