by Matthew Carr
In 1209, the Papacy unleashed a savage internal crusade against the Albigensian (Catharist) heresy in southern France that bordered on a war of extermination. Following the elimination of the last Cathar strongholds in 1229, a papal Inquisition was established in Toulouse to eliminate its survivors, and its activities spilled over into northern Spain and Catalonia, where some Cathars had fled persecution. The Papacy’s obsession with schism and the internal “defilement” of heresy was matched by a renewed determination to establish clear boundaries between Christians and non-Christians. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council ordered Jews and Muslims throughout Christendom to wear distinguishing clothing in order to eliminate the possibility of “damnable mixing” with them. These regulations were applied in Iberia, though as was often the case, they were not universally enforced or observed.
Spain was also drawn more closely into the orbit of Latin Christendom through the establishment of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and the emerging cult of Saint James Matamoros (Slayer of Moors) from the eleventh century onward. The pilgrimage route brought increasing numbers of Christians into Spain even as it enhanced the spiritual importance of Spain itself within Christendom. The promotion of the cult of Saint James owed much to the efforts of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in southern France, whose twelfth-century abbot Peter the Venerable authored two influential tracts on the “Saracen heresy” that were specifically intended for a Spanish readership. The powerful Cluniac abbots were fervent advocates of the Crusades, and their close links to the Christian rulers of the Reconquista, as well as their key role in organizing and facilitating the hugely popular Santiago pilgrimage route, provided another conduit through which European hostility toward the Saracens entered Spain.
The militancy of the Latin Church in the later Middle Ages coincided with a period in which Iberian Christian rulers achieved a series of spectacular conquests over the Moors, and the momentum of the Reconquista appeared unstoppable. Unlike Islam, the Christian treatment of Muslims and Jews was always a pragmatic concession rather than a permanent religious obligation; it was driven primarily by the desire to ensure reciprocal treatment for Christians living in Muslim territory and by the economic benefits that both Muslims and Jews brought to Spain’s underpopulated kingdoms. As Christian power became effectively unassailable and the Christian population once again became a majority in Iberia as a whole, the situation of the Muslims who lived under Christian rule became more precarious. In the second half of the thirteenth century Mudejar rebellions in Andalusia and Valencia were bloodily suppressed and followed by sporadic but vicious anti-Muslim pogroms.
But the most dramatic indication of Spain’s transformation was its changing treatment of Spanish Jews. In the early Middle Ages, Jews had been so favored by Christian rulers in Iberia that many European Jews came to regard Sefarad—the Hebrew word for Spain—as their natural homeland. Spain was never entirely immune to the outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and official repression that spread throughout Europe in the aftermath of the First Crusade, but conditions for Jews in Christian Iberia were nevertheless sufficiently benign to attract Jewish immigrants from Europe and also from the more discriminatory rule of the Almoravid and Almohad taifa states. In theory at least, Jews were protected from persecution by Christian rulers, who valued their administrative and financial prowess, and Jews within Christian courts were sometimes able to rise to high positions that were unimaginable elsewhere in Europe. By the late Middle Ages, Spain became the home for the largest Jewish population on the continent, and Iberian Jews had more reason to feel optimistic about their future than many of their European co-religionists.
All this began to change from the late thirteenth century onward, as Spain was affected by the militant Catholicism spreading through Europe and the hatred that converged on the “Christ-killing” Jew. Where the early medieval Church had once been prepared to engage with Judaism to some extent, theologians and preaching friars increasingly denounced the “perfidious Jew” and demanded that Jews convert to Christianity or be excluded from Christian society. In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, these calls found a receptive audience amid the catastrophic plagues, famines, and civil wars that ravaged the country during the fourteenth century, culminating in the horrors of the Black Death. Jews were often selected as scapegoats for these disasters and accused of poisoning Christians while remaining immune themselves. Popular anti-Semitism was sharpened by resentment at the positions achieved by some Jews at the upper levels of Christian society. And in the last decade of the fourteenth century, these sentiments produced an outpouring of hatred and violence that was to transform the relationship among all three faiths.
In 1391, these emotions burst brutally to the surface of Iberian society when an Andalusian priest named Ferrán Martínez delivered a series of vicious anti-Jewish sermons in Seville. Roused by Martínez’s rantings, a Christian mob descended on the Jewish quarter and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. This pogrom unleashed a firestorm of violence across Spain, as Christian mobs burned Jewish houses and synagogues, and thousands of Jews were killed or forced to become Christians in order to save their lives and property. “Wail, holy and glorious Torah, and put on black raiment, for the expounders of your lucid words perished in the flames,” lamented one survivor of these massacres, who wrote in his father’s Torah scroll how “For three months the conflagration spread through the holy congregations of the exile of Israel in Sepharad. . . . The sword, slaughter, destruction, forced conversions, captivity and spoliation were the order of the day.”2
During the next two decades, tens of thousands more Jews chose to convert to Christianity to avoid persecution and threats of further violence. These converts became known as conversos, judeoconversos, or “New Christians” to distinguish them from “Old” Spanish Christians who were neither of Jewish or Muslim ancestry. Though the ecclesiastical and secular authorities condemned the violence, they were unable to hold back the hot tide of hatred that coursed through many Spanish towns and cities in those years. Nor were they willing to reverse its consequences. After much debate over the theological validity of conversions imposed through violence and coercion, the Church declared these baptisms legitimate and effectively gave its retrospective sanction to what the mob had begun. The Christian authorities also made their own contribution to the conversion process. In 1412, Isabella’s English mother, Catherine of Lancaster, the regent of Castile and León, ordered Jews and Muslims to cease all economic and social contact with Christian society and confine themselves to their specified ghettoes on pain of death or the confiscation of their property. These “laws of Catalina” followed pressure from the Avignon Papacy and the fiery Valencian monk Saint Vicente Ferrer (1350–1419), a member of the Dominican “dogs of God,” who called for converted Jews to be separated from their co-religionists in order to ensure that they did not waver from their new faith.
A spellbinding orator, Ferrer liked to preach in cemeteries at nightfall, where the presence of penitents and flagellants magnified the emotional impact of sermons in which he urged that both Jews and Muslims should be separated from Christian society, since “Christian and infidel should not dwell together in the same house, for it is an evil which is contagious.”3 Inspired by Ferrer’s incendiary preachings, barefoot monks across Spain descended on synagogues flagellating themselves and ordering Jews to listen to nocturnal sermons in which they were urged to convert to Christianity.
Catherine’s laws were intended to bring about the same result by obliging Jews—and to a lesser extent Muslims—to choose between conversion and pariah status. Banned from working in the Castilian administration and a whole range of other professions where they came into contact with Christians, Jews were allowed to work only within their own communities. Thousands were forced to leave their homes and move into segregated ghettoes to quarantine them from Christians. Others were forced to live rough and starved or froze to death while their rabbis prayed desperately in Jewish cemetaries for the sou
ls of the righteous to intercede on their behalf. It was a grim and terrible period, in which many Jews shared the belief of one Jewish scholar that “the sky was covered with a cloud [so heavy] that it blocked the passage of any prayer to God.”4
As a result of these disastrous events, some three hundred thousand Jews and an unknown number of Muslims became baptised “New Christians.” These two decades marked a watershed in Spanish history, which paved the way for a festering social crisis that was to consume Spain for the rest of the fifteenth century. Not all Conversos had accepted baptism under duress. Many had embraced Christianity in the hope that conversion would bring an end to their exclusion and insecurity, and their sincerity was such that Jewish religious scholars sometimes denounced them as renegades and apostates. In the first half of the fifteenth century, these aspirations were largely realized, and Conversos were able to intermarry with Christians and achieve prominent positions in the nobility, the court, and the upper clergy. But this success soon produced an insidious reaction from the more anti-Semitic sectors within Christian society, which accused many of the Conversos of reneging on their new faith and continuing to worship as Jews behind a Christian façade.
In the course of the fifteenth century, the whispering campaign against these marranos (swine), as the alleged backsliders were known, became a toxic obsession in Christian society, particularly among the lower nobility and the urban middle classes, who resented the level of Converso integration and intermarriage, particularly among the high nobility. There was no doubt that some Jewish converts did revert to Judaism, but this was very different from the picture drawn by anti-Converso agitators of a vast Marrano conspiracy of evil at the very heart of Christian Spain, whose members perpetrated black magic, worshipped blasphemous idols, and carried out ritual murders of Christian children. The abhorrence of the Marranos was fueled by depictions of the Jews as an accursed race, stock, or breed whose despised religious beliefs were transmitted through their “perverse” lineage and blood.
It was in this period that the quasi-racist doctrine known as limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) first surfaced as a significant force in Spanish society. The concept of blood purity was to some extent an adaptation of aristocratic notions of noble lineage and “blue blood.” Where the Spanish hidalgo (gentleman) justified his position in the social hierarchy on the basis of the “honor” that stemmed from his superior lineage, the limpieza doctrine hearkened back to an imagined blood kinship that linked Old Christians to Spain’s pre-Islamic Visigothic and Latin past. This belief in an unblemished “pure” Christian lineage was contrasted with the representation of Judaism as an indelible “stain,” a “taint” that was transmitted through “blood.” The “infamy” that derived from such pollution, it was argued, could not be erased by baptism or intermarriage and constituted such a powerful source of defilement that even a single “drop” of such blood was potentially corrupting.
After centuries of conversion and intermarriage between all of Spain’s ethnic groups, few fifteenth-century Spaniards could claim to possess pure bloodlines. But the fantasy of purity and defilement proved no less compelling—and no less useful—in the fifteenth century than the “scientific” or “biological” racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or Nazi racial theories that presented the Jews as a corruption of the German “resevoir of blood” that required “racial hygiene.”
To some extent, Spain’s “religious” limpieza doctrines constitute a template for the more explicitly racialized variants that came later. Where fifteenth century limpieza theorists depicted Jewish “heresy” as a source of blood pollution, Spanish slave-owning colonists later established the inferior “black blood” of their Negro slaves on the basis of negative associations with skin color to justify a colonial hierarchy dominated by pure-blooded “white” Spaniards that still persists in many Latin American countries to this day. Where Spanish limpieza doctrine categorized people as Half New Christians or Quarter New Christians, according to their parentage, the population of French colonial Haiti would later be graded into 128 different variants of black blood to white, just as the slave-owning societies in the English-speaking Caribbean and the southern United States had similar hierarchies of quadroons, mulattoes, and octoroons.5
Whether these hierarchies are imagined in terms of race, religion, or nationality, they are invariably invoked to rationalize discrimination, persecution, or exploitation, and fifteenth-century Spain was no exception. The main targets of the limpieza doctrine were the Conversos, who found their positions in Christian society increasingly challenged and undermined. These doctrines did not go unchallenged. In the course of the fifteenth century, Christians and Conversos both inside and outside the Church vigorously refuted the concept of blood purity on religious and moral grounds and criticized the way that it was used to exclude the Conversos, but the whispering campaign against the Marrano “vipers” and “sons of the devil” continued to gain momentum. In 1449, the Toledo city council passed the Sentencia Estatuto, or Judgment Statute, which barred Conversos in the city from holding public office on the basis of their Jewish ancestry.
The statute was passed in the midst of a civic rebellion that was aimed at the hated chief minister of Castile, Alvaro de Luna, who was of Converso origin, and it quickly became an anti-Converso pogrom. The rebels were strongly criticized by leading Spanish clergymen and by the pope, and the statute was annulled and its progenitors excommunicated, though they were later rehabilitated and the Toledo statute became a model for similar statutes that began to proliferate in Spanish religious orders, universities, and other institutions from the late fifteenth century onward. It paved the way for what Joseph Pérez has called “the insidious prejudice of blood purity . . . that eventually poisoned the very spirit of the Spanish public.”6
This process did not take place overnight. The vigorous denunciations of the Toledo statute and the impassioned arguments for and against the inclusion of the Conversos were an indication of the intensity of the struggle that was taking place within Christian society in the fifteenth century. And by the second half of the century, it was a struggle that was beginning to constitute a serious threat to Spain’s social and political stability.
Even before the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Converso crisis had begun to assume dangerously destabilizing proportions. In Seville, where the Converso community was particularly prominent, there were pitched street battles between Conversos and Old Christians in 1465. In 1473, Conversos were driven out of Córdoba, after a battle in which they had mustered three hundred armed horsemen. Further anti-Converso riots took place in other Andalusian towns in the same period. In 1477 the king and queen visited Seville themselves, where local clergymen informed them that Marrano “Judaizers” were rife among the Converso community. According to legend, they were taken to the outskirts of the city one Friday evening, where it was pointed out to them that no fires were burning in the Converso district—a sign that its inhabitants were keeping the Sabbath. Ferdinand and Isabella were sufficiently alarmed by what they saw and heard to solicit a papal bull from Pope Sixtus IV, which authorized the establishment of an Inquisitorial tribunal in Castile to investigate heretics who had reverted to the “law of Moses.”
In doing so, they ushered in a malignant institution that would dominate Spanish society for more than three centuries. The introduction of a Spanish Inquisition was a long-standing demand of the anti-Converso lobby, and it differed from its medieval predecessor in that its leading officials were appointed by Spain’s rulers rather than the Papacy. This meant that it functioned as a political instrument of the Spanish Crown, even as it waged war against heresy with the religious authority of the Papacy. In 1480, two Dominican theologians were empowered to undertake a full Inquisitorial investigation into the Marrano conspiracy in Seville. These investigations quickly turned to a reign of terror against the Converso community, when a Jewish merchant’s daughter, who subsequently became known as la hermosa hembra (the b
eautiful maiden) overheard her father and a group of neighbors discussing resistance and reported their conversations to her Christian lover. As a result of this indiscretion, hundreds of Conversos were arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake, including her father. Others were punished with fines and the sequestration of their property or obliged to wear the sambenito, or penitential tunic, for the rest of their lives as a mark of perpetual infamy.
This onslaught decimated the Sevillian Converso community, and the Inquisition now extended its activities to other towns and cities in Castile under the direction of its fanatical Inquisitor General, Cardinal Tomás de Torquemada. In 1484 the Holy Office began to operate in Aragon, despite strong local opposition that bordered on sedition from some Aragonese towns. Even as the War of Granada was unfolding, Inquisition commissioners accompanied by their green-clad escorts, or “familiars” traveled the length and breadth of Spain, in an attempt to eradicate the heretical “infection” from Spanish society. Towns and cities across Spain became accustomed to the ritualistic pattern of these investigations, which began with the public reading of the Edict of Faith, calling upon the population to denounce the judaizers in their midst or confess to a detailed list of forbidden practices and telltale signs of the Jewish “superstition.” Such evidence might include a reluctance to eat pork, wearing clean clothes, not working on Saturdays, burying the dead in virgin soil, or not making the sign of the cross. Offenders who confessed willingly to such offenses could expect lenient treatment in the first instance, but repeat offenders were liable to excommunication and the terrifying anathema pronounced by an Inquisitorial edict in Valencia:May they be accursed in eating and drinking, in waking and sleeping, in coming and going. Accursed be they in living and dying, and may they ever be hardened in their sins, and the devil be at their right hand always; may their vocation be sinful, and their days be few and evil; may their substance be enjoyed by others, and their children be orphans and their wives widows. May their children ever be in need, and may none help them; may they be turned out of their homes and their goods taken by usurers; and may they find nobody to have compassion on them; may their children be ruined and outcast, and their names also; and their wickedness be ever present in the divine memory.7
