Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  The priest lowered his spectacles and stared at him with rheumy eyes. “What is your occupation?”

  “I am a merchant, as were my father and grandfather and great-grandfather before me. I import tobacco from the Portuguese estates in Brazil, and in turn export wine and other goods to the colonists.”

  “It is a family affair?”

  “My brothers and uncles and cousins are part of the trade.”

  “You bear a Portuguese name, and yet your brothers and uncles and cousins when they depart this realm to live abroad choose to change their forenames to those of their Jewish ancestors. Francisco becomes Abraham, João becomes Joshua, Luisa becomes Esther, Eleanor becomes Rebecca. They only retain the Portuguese surname Brandão because it is well known and good for business. Is that correct?”

  “You know we are conversos. When our Jewish ancestors were expelled from Spain by Isabella and Ferdinand, we came to Portugal and became New Christians, according to the law. That is how we have lived now for eight generations. But those who choose to go beyond this realm are not bound by the rules of this court or of the Kingdom of Portugal, and may choose to revert to the names of their ancestors.”

  “They did not leave Portugal legally. Conversos do not have the right to travel abroad. They fled the Inquisition.”

  “Hereticos,” one of the other priests muttered, pointing a crooked finger.

  “I am not responsible for the actions of my brothers and uncles and cousins,” João said.

  “Have you sent money abroad?” the first priest asked. “Do you too plan to flee Portugal?”

  “I only send money abroad to pay for trade goods.”

  The priest shuffled the papers in front of him, raised his spectacles, and peered down. “Two hundred and fifty gold ducats, three weeks ago, on a Portuguese merchant ship bound for Amsterdam, confiscated from the ship before it left Lisbon. The banker who managed the transaction denounced you.”

  João stared at the seal again, trying to keep his expression impassive. It had only been two weeks since they had come for him, seeking him first in his home in the hills at Viseu, the town in northern Portugal where his family had lived since their arrival in the country as refugees almost two hundred years before, and then at his warehouse near the mouth of the river Douro at Porto, the harbor city north of Lisbon where he carried out his business. He should have waited to consign the gold to one of the English navy vessels in the port rather than to a Portuguese ship. The English captains supplemented their meager pay by transporting money and specie at extortionate rates, but their ships were vessels of war, able to fight off Barbary corsairs, and were not subject to harbor inspections in Portuguese waters.

  He had been lax, but his attention had been on another cargo that day, a cargo of extraordinary secrecy, and only once he had seen that dispatched safely in a ship bound for the Caribbean had he felt a sudden urgency about safeguarding his own wealth, allowing himself to accept an offer from a captain of any nationality. He had been too hasty, and was paying the price for it now. The banker was a distant cousin on his wife’s side, another converso with whom he had always done business but who had evidently succumbed to the threats of the Inquisition and been willing to denounce his clients. The tentacles of the Inquisition spread far and wide, and nobody could any longer be trusted, even those of his own faith and family.

  The priest muttered something to the man by his side, then turned and conferred with the others on the bench behind him. João felt light-headed, weak from days with barely any food, but he had to keep the trial going for as long as possible to buy time. At least his payment for the secret cargo was safe from the clutches of the Inquisition, the silver pieces of eight overstamped with his own trade mark of a Star of David to keep others from being tempted to make off with them, and then dispatched in an English naval transport direct from the English colony of Tangier in North Africa to his brother in London. With that money on its way, he had made arrangements for his wife and children to flee Portugal on another ship. Despite the loss of the 250 ducats, he had the solace of knowing that when his family arrived in London they would not be penniless and destitute like so many other refugees from the Inquisition; his brother would see to that.

  He cleared his throat and tried to hold himself upright. “Of what am I accused?”

  The priest turned back toward him, and placed his hands on the lectern. The others followed his gaze, crossing their arms over their cassocks and staring at some distant point beyond. “You are accused of Judaism, heresy, and apostasy,” the priest said. “Judaism, because you have never renounced that faith. Heresy, because it is heretical not to believe in the sacred tenets of the Church of the Holy See. Apostasy, because having professed to be a Christian, you were clearly no such thing. How do you answer on each of these counts?”

  João glanced up at the tower, blinking hard in the dusty shaft of sunlight, trying to spot the dove, and then looked back at the priest. To be a converso arraigned before the Inquisition at Coimbra was almost inevitably to be accused in these terms, and to be certain of being condemned. And yet he experienced a wash of relief that his true purpose at the docks at Porto had not been discovered and that he had not been brought here to reveal that secret cargo, and he felt emboldened in his reply. With only one outcome possible no matter how he responded, there seemed nothing to lose. He stared defiantly at the priest. “I am accused, and therefore in the eyes of the tribunal I am guilty.”

  The priest looked at him sternly. “Confess, and the court may show you mercy. If the auto-da-fé is to be execution, we have the discretion to order the executioner to strangle you before your body is tied to the stake.”

  “I wish for no special treatment.”

  “Do you have anything further to say?”

  “I have this to say. I am placed in a cell five feet by eleven, with five others, where the only light comes from a narrow opening in the ceiling, where the chamber pot is emptied only once a week, and where all spiritual consolation is denied. The Holy Office of Portugal is a tribunal that serves only to deprive men of their fortunes, their honor, and their lives. It is unable to discriminate between guilt and innocence, and is holy in name only. Its works are cruelty and injustice. It is unworthy of rational beings, and unworthy of the God it professes to serve.”

  There was a sudden tension in the chamber. Those among the priests who had seemed impassive now stared at him with shock and contempt; the one with the crooked finger seemed apoplectic, unable even to point. João had repeated the words of Father António Vieira, the Jesuit priest and friend of the conversos, whose report on his own imprisonment had led the Pope to suspend the Portuguese Inquisition for seven years. Three years ago, when it had been reinstated, Father Vieira had fled to Brazil, knowing that the Papal Bull exempting him from prosecution was worth little more than the paper it was written on, and that there would be agents of the Inquisition who would hunt him down to the far corners of the earth. He had set himself up as head of a community deep in the rainforest, protected by conversos who had once served as soldiers of the Portuguese king, and by others, English, Dutch, and Germans among them, who had gone to the New World in search not of gold and silver but of a different kind of treasure, of enlightenment and toleration far removed from the cruelty that the Inquisition and age-old prejudices had inflicted on the Old World.

  By repeating the words of Father Vieira, João knew that he was sealing his own fate, but it was hardly as if it had hung in the balance; the Inquisition had returned with a vengeance after its suspension, using the overheard conversations of those relaxed years as evidence of heresy almost as if they had planned it, and many conversos who would previously have been let off with a penance were now going straight to the stake. He knew now that his dream of one day joining Father Vieira was over, but he took solace in the covenant he had made with his brother in London to use that silver to buy passage for his wife and children to their cousins in Port Royal in Jamaica, and thence to seek a sa
fe route away from prying eyes across to Brazil and to the chosen place. He remembered, too, the promise he had made to Father Vieira when he had first heard of the treasure that he was to dispatch to safety: that one day that too would reach the promised land, that it would make the place so holy that the power of those who would seek it would fall away like storm waves battering an island fortress, spent and impotent.

  The smell of burning from the auto-da-fé was stronger, and he imagined invisible wisps of smoke encircling him like a coil of snakes, drawing the flames in after them. He remembered as a boy being dragged by the priest from his schoolroom to the quemadero, the place of burning in the square outside, to watch his grandfather’s auto-da-fé. The priest had pinched him by the ear until he cried, and had told him that his grandfather was being shown mercy, that it was better to burn quickly on earth than eternally in hell.

  But they had not burned him quickly; they had lashed him naked to a stake and placed a ring of glowing coals around him, a fiery ring that they pushed ever closer until he was roasted alive. It was the same fate that had been suffered in the Roman Colosseum by Laurentius, one of their own community who had felt the call of Christ and gone to Rome at the time of the emperors, and was now revered as a saint for his martyrdom. Watching with horror his grandfather’s fate, it had seemed to João that history had collapsed in on itself, that all those generations since Laurentius had been swept away and he himself was standing on the blood-soaked ground of the Colosseum, the agents of darkness who had brought about Laurentius’s death now on his own trail as well.

  He felt his palms go clammy, his breathing shorten, and he shivered in spite of the heat of the chamber. The next walk he took would be his last, following the condemned man before him, whose last bodily exhalations had now returned to wreathe the chamber. He must try not to show his fear, try to keep his dignity in front of the crowd outside, to show those who had been forced to attend the auto-da-fé that he was still able to stand on his own two feet, that the Inquisition had not broken him.

  Suddenly, without a word, the president rose, followed by the rest of the tribunal, and they filed silently out. João knew that this could only be a brief reprieve, part of the theater of the court. He stared again at the cross on the seal below the lectern, trying to keep his mind focused, to keep his thoughts strong against what lay ahead. The cross was the same shape he had seen countless times on the pieces of eight that had fueled his life as a merchant, made from the silver ore that had been the greatest source of wealth from the New World once the gold of the Aztecs and the Maya and the Inca had run out. He had been there himself when he was young, to the great silver mines of the mountains, traveling from Port Royal in Jamaica to Mexico and then south to the viceroyalty of Peru, inland by llama to the high Andes.

  At Potosi he had seen the mountain of riches, the Cerro Rico, where wealth seemed to flow like burning lava and yet which seemed to suck men into it, not only those whose greed became too much but also the countless Inca who died from their toil, their lungs choked by dust. Every planchet of silver, every rough-cut piece of eight, all of them stamped with the arms of Castile and Leon, represented a terrible human cost. Each year millions were minted, and thousands died. For weeks after his visit he could still smell the molten arsenic used to refine the silver, the reek of the underworld itself. For João, the cross stamped on each coin had come to represent the bars of a prison, locking away a grim truth on the other side of the world where the avarice of a few had condemned so many to a living hell.

  He shut his eyes, running again over his business dealings as he had done every day since his arrest, reassuring himself that he had left his affairs in good order. Months earlier, he had dispatched 800 gold escudos to Port Royal in Jamaica, where, God willing, it would remain in the safe hands of his cousin until his wife and children should arrive. Port Royal had been good to the Brandão family, a place well suited to their way of doing business. They had offered brokerage to the buccaneers of the Spanish Main, men with letters of marque from the Governor of Jamaica to attack Spanish ships carrying silver and gold from Mexico and Peru, and all manner of goods for the settlers in the other direction. Buccaneers with plunder not in bullion or specie brought their goods to the wharves of Port Royal for a quick sale, and were usually satisfied with a few reales to spend on the whores and taverns of the port; those goods in turn went for a healthy premium to the Portuguese colonists of Brazil, creating a circle of trade that kept everyone happy: the pirates, the merchants, the governor of Jamaica, even the Portuguese customs officials of Brazil who took their cut, to the discomfort only of the Spanish Crown.

  And then there had been the business of Tangier. João’s father had jumped at the chance when the English had taken over the city from the Portuguese and made it a free port, encouraging Portuguese merchants already there to remain and expand their dealings. They had watched the dissipation and corruption of the English colonists, just as they had done in Port Royal. Dissipation and corruption could be good for business, providing the goods and money continued to flow. In Jamaica the source of wealth was the Spanish Main; in Tangier, it was to have been the treasures of the East, with the city a halfway house for the plunder of the Indies. But Jamaica was in an ocean where the English navy held sway, whereas Tangier was hemmed in on three sides by the besieging army of the Moors, a force that proved too much for an English garrison enfeebled by drink and disease. The English had their hands full at home, with the seemingly endless conflicts with the Dutch and in Ireland and the threat of a religious civil war, and holding on to the failing colony had proved just too much.

  João remembered the portly, bewigged Englishman from the Admiralty who had sought him out in Tangier three months before, always jotting down notes in his curious shorthand, his Portuguese halting and imprecise. The English Crown had decided to appease foreign merchants in Tangier who might be of future use by offering them generous compensation and resettlement, even allowing them to buy surplus equipment and stores at a token price. But these arrangements were not the main reason why the Englishman, Samuel Pepys, had befriended him. In Tangier, the Jewish conversos had been free to follow their old religion, but few had done so openly, many of them still having interests in Portugal and unwilling to risk arrest by the Inquisition should they have to return home; as it transpired, the English decision to leave Tangier and repatriate the merchants had shown their caution to be wise. Pepys had sought him out because the Brandão family were known for their discretion and care, both in keeping their faith to themselves and in their business dealings; they could continue to conduct business in Portugal more safely than converso merchants who had been less careful, something that had been critical to the proposition that he had come to discuss.

  The Englishman had known something else: that João came from a family of Jews sympathetic to Christianity who had fled Judaea after the Roman conquest and gone to live in Spain, and then after the expulsion had settled not only in Portugal but also in a wide diaspora including England, Holland, and the islands of the Caribbean. He had come not only because of the Brandão reputation, to drive a bargain for freightage to the New World with one of the most reliable firms operating out of Tangier, but also because of that history; to deal with a family who for over a thousand years had provided safe haven and succor in their mountain fastness to refugees from the persecutions of those elements in the Church who would eventually form the basis of the Inquisition. The Englishman had wanted discretion and reliability, but also to deal with those to whom he could reveal the nature of his cargo and who would share his passion for its safe arrival somewhere far away from those elements, in a place akin to the haven that the Spanish Jewish community had once provided to refugees from Roman persecution but which now would need to be in a place of security somewhere beyond the fringes of a far wider world.

  João had wept with joy and relief when the Englishman had revealed the nature of his cargo. For over a thousand years, that very treasure had bee
n protected by the Brandão family, ever since it had been brought from Rome by a Christian legionary escaping persecution by the emperors. The Brandão family themselves were descended from the legionary, a man called Proselius who had married a Jewish girl. They had protected it through the centuries, through the collapse of empires and the ravages of lawlessness and war, telling nobody but their own children, generation after generation, until they were uprooted by the eviction of the Jews from Spain and decided in fear for its safety on their long trek west to pass it on to the castle fastness of the Knights of Malta.

  There it should have remained, secure until the time for its revelation, but then the worst had happened. The master of the order was captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates, and in desperation those knights who remained, weakened in body and resolve, had chosen to offer up the treasure as ransom. It had passed from the pirates to their Moorish overlords, and then to the Sultan of Morocco. The Sultan’s eye had been fixed on Tangier, obsessively, an all-consuming passion, and he too had used the treasure as a bargaining chip, to secure as much as he could of the gunpowder and artillery and fortifications of the town from the English, in return for allowing them to depart unmolested.

  It had been the Englishman, Samuel Pepys, an official sent by Charles II to wrap up his affairs at Tangier, whom the Sultan’s emissary had approached for the negotiations. As soon as Pepys had seen what was on offer, he had agreed to the terms but sworn the Sultan to secrecy. The treasure could not return to the English Crown, to Charles II, where it might become a pawn in the religious war that seemed about to erupt, a conflict between Catholic and Protestant. Instead, Pepys would find a way for it to be spirited off to a new place of safety. That had led him to seek out João in Tangier, to strike a bargain, and then to find him again in secrecy at his warehouse at Porto three weeks ago in order to pass him the package and the silver that was to be used to pay the captain of the chosen ship—Henry Avery of the Black Swan, though Avery was not to know the true nature of the package he was to transport—for its safe passage to the New World.