How slender was the evidence required when a Portuguese was concerned is seen in another case at Valladolid. When the inquisitor Pedro Múñoz made a visitation of Oviedo in 1619-20, two women testified that Lucía Núñez, a Portuguese settled in Benavente, put on clean chemises on Saturdays. When, March 5, 1620, the tribunal voted on the cases brought in by Múñoz, this was suspended, but the Suprema ordered the papers to be sent to it and, on August 17, 1621, it instructed the tribunal to arrest Lucía and sequestrate her property. She was accordingly brought to Valladolid, October 30, 1621, and thrown into the secret prison. On her first audience, in reply to the ordinary question whether she knew the cause of her arrest, she said that it was because she changed her linen on Fridays and Saturdays, as she did every day, for the sake of cleanliness, especially when she was suckling her children, and she did not know that she was committing any offence. It was true that she was born in Portugal, but both her parents were Castilians and Old Christians. The trial went through its regular course; nothing else could be found against her and, on March 15, 1622, the consulta de fe voted to acquit her and lift the sequestration, which was done accordingly the next day, after nearly five months of incarceration.[809]

When this kind of work was on foot throughout Spain, it is easy to realize how the unfortunate Portuguese were tracked, from one refuge to another, by the implacable vigilance of the Inquisition, with its net-work of tribunals, in constant correspondence, and its commissioners and familiars everywhere on the watch. That vigilance was kept alive by the frequent discovery of communities of Judaizers, more or less numerous, whose trials revealed the names of abundant accomplices. The tribunal of Llerena was busy, from 1635 to 1638, with the “complicidad de Badajoz,” a group of Portuguese, whom it had unearthed at Badajoz and, when the Suprema called for a list of those inculpated by the prisoners, whom it had not been able to arrest, they amounted to a hundred and fifty.[810]

In 1647, Juan del Cerro, of Ciudad Rodrigo, was a prisoner in the royal gaol of Valladolid. Apparently hoping for release, he denounced himself to the Inquisition and told a story of a congregation of Jews at Ciudad Rodrigo, which met every Friday in the house of the president, Pablo de Herrera, paymaster of the army on the Portuguese frontier, when the ceremony of scourging images of Christ and the Virgin was performed and then, during Holy week, they were burnt. Numerous arrests were made and the trials dragged on until 1651; torture was employed, parents and children, brothers and sisters testified against each other, but there were no pertinacious impenitents or negativos and none were relaxed. That Juan del Cerro’s story of the outrages on the sacred images was recognized as fictitious is evident from the suspension of ten of the cases, including those of the so-called officers of the congregation, but the tribunal secured a satisfactory number of convictions, as well as fines amounting to thirty-seven hundred ducats. Juan del Cerro made nothing by his device for, though he was not prosecuted for false-witness, when the trials were over in 1651, he was handed back to the royal court.[811] Toledo was equally active for, in an auto held the same year, it had thirty-two Judaizers in person and thirty effigies of fugitives.[812] Nearly the whole of these were Portuguese for, by this time, Castilian Judaizers were of comparatively rare occurrence. In the great Seville auto of 1660, out of eighty-one Judaizers, nearly all Portuguese, a group of thirty-seven were from Osuna and another of eight from Utrera. There were forty-seven reconciled, seven relaxed in person and twenty-seven in effigy.[813]

The numerous effigies which figure in the autos indicate those who were compromised in the confessions of the penitents, and who succeeded for a time in eluding arrest. As a rule it may be said that this was but a temporary reprieve from the all-pervading vigilance of the Inquisition. Sooner or later, it gathered them in despite change of residence and name, and all the precautions of the hunted against the hunter. This is well illustrated in the vicissitudes of a colony of Portuguese, some twenty or thirty in number, in the little town of Beas (Jaen), which throw a vivid light on the miseries of these unfortunates. They had succeeded in living there obscurely for ten years or more, supporting themselves by such industries as they could follow, when some imprudence, or the watchfulness of some neighbor, drew upon them the attention of the tribunal of Cuenca, which arrested thirteen of them. From these the names of nine others were obtained, for whom warrants of arrest were issued but, when these were sent for execution, in April, 1656, it was found that they had left Beas secretly in February, abandoning their property. Five of them were traced to Málaga; the other four were said to have gone to Pietrabuena, but there the track was lost. All were duly prosecuted in absentia and their effigies formed part of the Seville auto of 1660.

ACTIVITY OF PERSECUTION

The party that went towards Portugal was a family group of five—Diego Rodríguez Silva, his wife Ana Enríquez, her father Antonio Enríquez Francia, and her brother and sister-in-law, Diego Enríquez and Isabel Rodríguez. They pushed through without stopping to Rioseco, where they rested four days and then, hiring a guide, they traversed the mountains of Portugal, travelling only by night. Settling in Villa Pinhel, they tried to mend their broken fortunes, Ana Enríquez by keeping a shop and Diego Rodríguez by turning his hand to whatever he could find to do—at one time we hear of him as driving a thousand sheep to Lisbon for sale. Apparently by way of precaution, they appeared spontaneously before the tribunal of Coimbra, which treated them mercifully, imposing no fines but ordering them not to leave Pinhel without permission. Misfortune pursued Diego and, in 1671, he returned to Spain, stopping at Talavera de la Reina, whence he sent for his wife and children and father-in-law, telling the rest to remain. He took the name of del Aguila for himself and de los Rios for his wife, and settled for two years in Seville, where his father-in-law died. Thence they removed to Daimiel, where the Inquisition found them at last and arrested them, February 18, 1677, some seventeen years after they had been burnt in effigy in Seville. As two or three of the Beas fugitives, who had gone to Málaga, were on trial at Toledo in 1667, it is probable that none escaped save those who remained in Portugal. Two years and a half were spent on the trials of Diego and Ana, ending with a sentence of irremissible prison and sanbenito. Ana had broken down under this wandering life of incessant vicissitudes and anxiety; she had become the victim of epilepsy, melancholia and hypochondria, when her pitiless judges sent her to prison for life in vindication of a religion of infinite love and charity.[814]

An even more pitiful illustration of the miseries endured by these unfortunates, under the implacable vigilance of the Inquisition, is afforded by the case of Isabel, wife of Francisco Palos, of Ciudad Rodrigo. In 1608, when 22 years of age, she was tried by the Valladolid tribunal. Subsequently she was tried twice, in 1621 and 1626, at Llerena, twice at Cuenca, in 1653 and 1655, and finally in 1665 at Toledo. Altogether, about eighteen years were spent in these trials; the last one, in which she was thrice tortured, continued until 1670, when she was in her eighty-fourth year and eluded her tormentors by dying in prison, to be burnt in effigy with her bones as a difunta.[815]

Little colonies of Portuguese, like that of Beas, were frequently discovered. Simon Múñoz of Pastrana, on trial at Toledo, in 1679, gave the names of twenty-nine accomplices residing there, nearly all of whom figured in an auto particular of December 21, 1680. They had long succeeded in eluding inquisitorial vigilance, for one of them, María Enríquez, then sixty years old, testified that she had been brought thither from Lisbon by her parents, when a little child and had always lived there.[816] A similar group of Portuguese, in the little town of Berin (Orense) were tried between 1676 and 1678, by the tribunal of Santiago, and furnished to the Madrid auto of 1680 two victims relaxed as pertinacious Jews—Baltasar López Cardoso and Feliz López his cousin. There were more than twenty of them in all, and they had long been settled there; Antonio López, one of them, said, in 1677, that he was thirty-two years old and had been born in Berin.[817]

DECAY OF JUDAISM

It was only by the most stringent caution that existence could be maintained under these conditions. Gaspar de Campos, one of the Pastrana group, gives, in his confession, some account of the devices adopted for concealment. On the Sabbath the mother and girls would sit with reels or spinning wheels before them and, if any one came in, would pretend to be at work. On fast days the servant-girl would be sent out on an errand; during her absence food would be taken out of the olla and plates and spoons would be greased, they would then go to the house of a neighbor Jewess and, when the servant followed them, she would be sent back to get her dinner, telling her that they had dined, and then the neighbor would do the same. Even in the closest family circle the utmost reserve was often practised. Children were not allowed to know anything of Judaism until of an age at which their discretion could be trusted. Parents, indeed, frequently brought up their children as Catholics, and left it to others to convert them fortuitously. Pedro Núñez Marques, tried in Madrid in 1679, testified that he had been inducted into Judaism in Villaflor (Portugal) by María Pinto, wife of Alvaro de Morales. After he returned to his father’s house, in Torre de Moncorvo, he hesitated for months to let his parents know of his conversion, At last, in 1653, he told his mother, when she approved of it and said that both she and his father, Francisco Núñez Ramos, were Jews. There were eight children of them; he knew them all to be Jews but could give no details, except as to three sisters: they all assumed each other to be so, but each one attended to his own affairs, to earn a living, and to live with the utmost precaution. As his sister Angela Núñez Marques expressed it, they all knew each other to be Portuguese; that was sufficient, and further confidences were superfluous.[818]