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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have incurred numerous debts to various persons and institutions during the three years that I have spent as a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge researching the thesis that provided the first version of this work. My supervisor, Professor David Abulafia, has read many drafts of this work, providing numerous insightful comments regarding both its content and style. Likewise, I am grateful to Professor David Nirenberg who has read several chapters and provided valuable feedback. Professors Hugh Kennedy and Francisco Bethencourt, who examined my doctoral thesis in October 2006, corrected various oversights and made a number of suggestions from which this work has benefited greatly.
In Portugal, I am heavily indebted to Dr. Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros of the University of Evora. Dr. Barros has been both a valued colleague and a close friend during the last three years. She generously allowed me to read a draft of her own fascinating unpublished Ph.D. thesis before she submitted it and provided me with hundreds of transcriptions of documents preserved in the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo that concern the Muslim minority in medieval Portugal. Few modern scholars can claim to have single-handedly shed light on a social group which, until now, had been mostly unknown but the work of Dr. Barros has been truly inspirational for my own research.
I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Professor Istvan Szaszdi LeonBorja of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who generously sent to me numerous copies of his articles and works—including his edition of the anonymous Memorial Portugués—which I was unable to obtain in any library of the United Kingdom. On a linguistic note, I am grateful to Baruch and Naomi Spiro, who both provided crucial assistance with certain Hebrew passages that were beyond my skills in that language. All quotations in Hebrew and Arabic in the footnotes are reproduced verbatim from the various printed editions in which I found them and which are duly referenced.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to the archivists and staff of archives and libraries in Portugal who not only patiently fielded the many requests I put to them but also actively helped me to locate various documents and microfilms. My hearty thanks go to the staff of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Biblioteca Nacional and Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon. Outside of the Portuguese capital, I received ready assistance from the staff in the Arquivo Distrital in Evora as well as both the Arquivo Municipal and Biblioteca Municipal in Porto. In Britain, I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the interlibrary loans department of the University Library at Cambridge.
My years as a doctoral research student at the University of Cambridge were made possible by a research award that I received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Travel to various archives and conferences in the United Kingdom and Portugal was greatly facilitated by additional awards from the James Ferris and Graduate Research funds (King’s College Cambridge), the Prince Consort and Thurswall fund (Faculty of History, Cambridge) and the Frederick William Maitland Memorial Fund (Faculty of Law, Cambridge). I also thank Marcella Mulder and Renee Otto, of Brill, who have patiently and expertly guided me through the various stages that have led to the publication of this book.
Last, but certainly not least, I wish to express my appreciation to my family. I owe an immense debt to Katie and her family whose love and support have been a constant source of encouragement during the past three years. My parents Pamela and Bernard Soyer have supported me throughout my academic studies and without their support this work would never have seen the light of day. They have read many drafts of this work and advised me on numerous points of style and grammar. It is to them that I dedicate this work. Of course it goes without saying that all errors and omissions are entirely my own.
Francois Soyer Lisbon (April, 2007)
NOTES FOR READERS: NAMES, DATES AND CURRENCY
Nomenclature
The multilingualism of the Medieval Iberian Peninsula poses a dilemma for any modern historian who wishes to adopt a uniform system for the names of individuals and geographical features. In this respect, historians working on Portuguese history face a situation that is no different from the other realms of the Iberian Peninsula.
The names of Portuguese Christians have been rendered in their modern Portuguese forms and have not been anglicised. Thus, for example, I have kept Joao and Simao and not changed them into their English forms John or Simon. In the case of King Manuel of Portugal, I have preferred to use the modern Portuguese name rather than the alternatives Emmanuel and Manoel that are occasionally found in other works. The names of Castilian Christians have been likewise given in their modern Spanish (Castilian) forms (Isabel, Juan or Fernando) to prevent any confusion between Portuguese and Castilians.
Most Portuguese and Castilian Jews adopted biblical first names and these have been rendered into their modern English equivalents such as Abraham (07728), Jacob (2p"), Samuel (Sxinw), Moses ("WN), Joseph (01) and Isaac (7N¥?). The only instances when I have chosen to retain the original Portuguese forms of Jewish names are when Jews, and more particularly Jewesses, bore names which, to my knowledge, have no modern English or Hebrew equivalents, such as Cimfa, Oraboa or Velida. Lastly, for the sake of uniformity, the original non-standardised Portuguese transliterations of Arabic names that are found in fourteenth or fifteenth-century documents have not been retained. The names of Muslims have been transliterated into modern Latin characters with the standard symbols used to differentiate between long or short vowels and different letters of the Arabic alphabet. These, for instance, are the most common transliterations:
The names of Jews and Muslims in official Portuguese documents rarely use patronymic forms. Binomial name forms similar to those of Christians, which included both a forename followed by a second component, are prevalent in official documents.' The second component, or “surname”, might refer to either to a trade, a geographical origin or may even simply be a nickname (for instance Muhammad Ratinho or “little mouse”). To avoid the overuse of italics I have chosen not to italicise the second name. Lastly, during the period covered by this work, Portuguese and Castilian sources referred to Muslims as mouros or moros and, throughout this work, I have deliberately chosen to translate this as “Muslims” rather than “Moors”.
Referring to Isabel and Fernando as the rulers of “Spain” creates special problems as the modern Spanish state did not exist in the period
covered by this work. The kingdoms of Castile, Navarre and the Crown of Aragon which now form part of Spain were all independent political entities. As such I have attempted to limit my use the designation “Spanish” to refer only to the geographical area that is modern-day Spain or, exceptionally, when I wish to allude to both the realms of Aragon and Castile. The names of towns and rivers have been rendered into their original Portuguese or Spanish form with the exception of Lisbon. When a possible clash occurs, such as with the rivers that run through both kingdoms, I have adopted the modern Portuguese names (for instance Douro and Tejo instead of Duero and Tajo).
Finally, the official titles adopted by the Kings of Portugal during the period reflected their claim to sovereignty both in Europe and beyond. Thus the somewhat prolix title of King Manuel I in 1496-7 was “Manuel by the grace of God King of Portugal and the Algarves on this side of the sea and on the other side in Africa (i.e. Morocco) and Lord of Guinea.”? This plurality of crowns explains why, in official documents, the King often uses the plural to refer to “his kingdoms” and this plural form has been kept in the translations that are quoted in this work although in the text itself I have chosen, so as to avoid unnecessary confusion, to refer to Manuel and his predecessors simply as Kings of Portugal.
Dates
Until August 1422, the calendar used in Kingdom of Portugal was the “Caesarean Era”—also known as the “Spanish Era”—which added an extra 38 years to the Christian calendar. From August 1422, Portugal adopted the Julian calendar already adopted by all the other Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. Unless specifically stated in the text, all the dates in this work are in the Julian Christian calendar. Dates given in the Jewish calendar are always accompanied by their Christian equivalent.
Currency
The currency of Portugal during the period covered by this work was divided into the following units following reforms instituted by King Joao II in 1485: two gold coins known as the justo (pl. justos) and the cruzado (pl. cruzados) and two silver coins known as the vintém (pl. vinténs) and the real (pl. reais). The value of these different coins was the following:
1 justo = 2 cruzados. 1 cruzado = 390 reais. 1 vintém = 20 reais.
The currency in Castile during the same period was divided into the gold coins known as the dobla (or excelente) and the silver real. Other gold coins of lesser value in circulation included the enrique, castellano and dobla de la banda. The maravedi, a gold coin first minted in the twelfth century, had by this time been reduced to a base metal coin of little value but was widely used as a currency of account. In January 1480, the Ordinances of Toledo fixed the value of the different coins at the following rates:
A later ordinance of June 1497 replaced the gold dobla by the ducado as the main gold coin. The new gold ducado was also valued at 375 maravedis and the silver real at 34 maravedis.
INTRODUCTION
The past decades have witnessed a surge of academic and popular interest in the religious pluralism that characterised the medieval Christian kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Navarre, which now form the modern kingdom of Spain. This development is probably, to a large extent, due to the increasingly heterogeneous ethnic and religious makeup of modern-day society in Europe and North America which impels historians to search for and examine precedents of cultural interaction in the past. In this respect the medieval Iberian Peninsula presents a fascinating field for such historical investigation.
For centuries Jewish and Muslim minorities of various sizes cohabited more or less peacefully alongside a dominant Christian population. Jews and Muslims were permitted to practise their faiths and live in autonomous communities under royal protection provided that they paid discriminatory taxes and did not challenge the dominant faith. This religious pluralism only came to an end in all three kingdoms with the expulsion of the Jews at the close of the fifteenth century and forced conversion of the Muslims at the start of the sixteenth century.
This work endeavours to bring into focus parallel developments that took place in the kingdom of Portugal, the fourth Christian realm of the Iberian Peninsula in the late fifteenth century and the only one to have preserved its political sovereignty outside of the modern Spanish state. Jewish and Muslim minorities also existed in Portugal during this period and they too became victims of the wave of religious intolerance that swept the Iberian Peninsula. In December 1496 King Manuel I of Portugal (1495-1521) issued a public proclamation ordering all the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of his realm to leave within ten months or face the death penalty and loss of all their property. The following year, in spite of his earlier assurances and promises of transport out of the kingdom, the King decided to prevent the departure of the Jews and forced most of them to convert to Christianity. The Muslims, however, were allowed to leave because of fear of reprisals against Christians in Islamic territory.
The long history of Jews in medieval Western Christendom is punctuated by a string of forcible conversions and expulsions from various regions of Christendom. The fate of Spanish Jewry, expelled by the rulers of Aragon and Castile in March 1492, is perhaps the best known of all these tragedies. In contrast to this, the forced conversion of the Jewish minority in Portugal has attracted far less academic scrutiny, in spite of the fact that there are now excellent general studies by talented Portuguese historians of the social condition of the Jews, and more recently of the Muslims, in medieval Portugal.’ To these must also be added a number of localised studies that have attempted to reconstruct the lives and environment of specific Jewish and Muslim communities.’
Nevertheless, despite the considerable advances in research on these two minorities, no work has yet dealt specifically with the persecutions of 1496-7. It is tempting to speculate why these events have drawn only limited academic interest, especially outside of Portugal, and have been largely overshadowed by the Castilian and Aragonese expulsion of 1492. So far as historians of Jewish Sephardic history are concerned, this neglect may be due in a large part to the fact that many have generally equated the Hebrew term Sefarad (1150) with “Spain” whereas it refers more accurately to the whole of the geographical area south of the Pyrenean mountains that is the Iberian Peninsula. Sefarad and thus also includes the medieval kingdom (and modern day republic) of Portugal. Moreover, many prominent historians who have focused on the persecution of Spanish Jewry and worked in Spanish archives have not ventured to cross the border and pursue their investigations in Portuguese archives.
It is all the more startling that modern scholars, particularly those outside Portugal, should have paid such scant attention to the persecutions of 1496-7 since the process by which religious tolerance in Portugal came to an end presents some key differences with the developments in Castile, Aragon and even Navarre (from which the Jews were expelled in 1498).° Firstly, in Portugal it was the Jews who were forced to convert and the Muslims who were expelled whereas in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula it was the Jews who were expelled and the Muslims who were forced to convert. Forced conversions of Jews to Christianity carried out with the sanction of the Crown took place in Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula and the Byzantine Empire during the late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.* Although forced conversions continued to occur after the seventh century, and particularly from the end of the eleventh century, this was usually in a very different context. Later forced conversions took place during riots and massacres carried out by mobs and clergy without the support of Kings or local lords. In the Iberian Peninsula itself, thousands of conversions took place in Castile and Aragon during the riots and massacres that erupted in the spring and summer of 1391 but these were carried out without royal sanction.’ Royal and lordly persecutions of Jews from the late eleventh century onwards took the form of expulsions as was the case in England, France and later in Castile and Aragon.°
There are only a few exceptions. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, large numbers of Jews in southern Italy, accused of assisting relapsed converts, were pressured into converting by Dominican Inquisitors but the impetus behind this movement lay with the Inquisitors rather than with King Charles II of Naples.” Nevertheless, as will become clear in the following chapters, the sheer brutality of the forced conversion of the Portuguese Jews and the direct involvement of King Manuel I in its instigation present a startling departure from the norm. Secondly, whilst a decade separated the persecution of the Jews from that of Muslims in Castile (even longer in the lands of the Crown of Aragon and in Navarre), the persecution in Portugal simultaneously struck both Jews and Muslims. At a single stroke King Manuel created the first kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula to boast, officially at least, of an entirely Christian population and to have completely extinguished the coexistence of Christians, Muslims and Jews that had so distinguished the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe during the Middle Ages.
Since the nineteenth century, there has been little change in the way modern historians have viewed the events of 1496-7. According to the master narrative unanimously put forward by scholars both in and outside of Portugal, the decision Manuel took to end his predecessors’s policy of religious tolerance was motivated by his desire to rule over the entire Iberian Peninsula by marrying the eldest daughter of Queen Isabel of Castile (1474-1504) and King Fernando of Aragon (1479-1516). Isabel and Fernando stipulated that the Portuguese King must first expel the Jews and Muslims and Manuel meekly acceded to their demand. The historian Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), universally acclaimed as the father of modern Portuguese historiography, briefly examined the events of 1497 in his seminal study of the origins and establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536. It was clear for Herculano that the Portuguese monarch, paying no heed to the misgivings of many of his councillors, ceded to Spanish demands to expel the Jews and Muslims because of his own selfish desire to further his dynastic pretensions over the Iberian Peninsula:
Princess Isabel was the eldest daughter of the Catholic Monarchs and the heir to the throne should their only male heir Prince Juan die. By marrying her, the King of Portugal saw the prospect, or a least the possibility, of uniting both the Iberian crowns [i.e. Portugal and Spain] under his rule.*
This view was also that accepted by later historians of Portuguese Jewry, such as Rabbi Meyer Kayserling and Joaquim Mendes dos Remedios, as well as by the authors of more general works such as Heinrich Graetz and José Amador de los Rios.’ A number of recent articles have adopted the traditional historiography and continued to depict King Manuel as a wildly ambitious monarch who recklessly sacrificed his Jewish and Muslim subjects on the altar of his personal ambition.'® The only notable development has been the strong emphasis Tavares added in her work on what she believed to be the negative social impact on Portuguese society of the arrival of large numbers of Jewish refugees from Castile in 1492. This view is unambiguously asserted in her work:
Regardless of the number of Castilian Jews who settled in Portugal, it is a fact that their arrival in the Kingdom [of Portugal] had a destabilising effect on Portuguese society and particularly on relations between the Christian majority and the indigenous Jewish minority. (...) The expulsion edict [of 1496] is therefore a direct consequence of the destabilisation of Portuguese society, aggravated by other factors of a domestic nature or linked to peninsular politics."'
This study seeks to challenge these widely held views by presenting three distinct premises relating to the breakdown of Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations in Portugal: 1. That there is little concrete evidence to suggest that the sudden arrival in Portugal of thousands of Jews expelled from Castile in 1492 was a catalyst that caused a sudden deterioration of the situation of Portuguese Jews and thus created conditions that inevitably led to the disaster of 1497.
2. That even though Manuel was pressured by Isabel and Fernando into issuing the edict ordering the Jews to leave his kingdom, that decision was not the action of a power-hungry king who harboured designs of hegemony over the entire Iberian Peninsula. Rather it was the consequence of King Manuel's calculating and pragmatic diplomacy that aimed at securing a lasting peace with his powerful neighbours in order to allow him to concentrate on other, quite different, objectives.
3. That the expulsion of the Muslim minority from Portugal, though it took place at the same time as the persecution of the Jews, was brought about because of very different considerations on Manuel's part and therefore has to be analysed separately.
These arguments will be developed in the five separate chapters of this work will cover not only the situation of the Jewish and Muslim minorities prior to 1496 but also Manuel's rise to power, his ambitions and his diplomatic relations with Castile.
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the history of the Jewish and Muslim minorities in Portugal during the medieval period up to the 1480s and considers various questions relating to their origins, organisation into autonomous communities under royal protection, the special tax system to which they were subjected and their relations with both the dominant Christian population and the Crown.
Chapter 2 closely examines the social impact of the arrival in Portugal firstly of numerous Jewish converts to Christianity (conversos) fleeing from the Inquisition tribunals of Castile in the 1480s and then of thousands of Jewish refugees who were expelled from Spain in 1492. Using a range of Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew sources, many of them unedited, I argue that the consequences of these events for the Kingdom of Portugal have been vastly exaggerated by modern historians. The impact of 1492 in particular was mitigated by the fact that the majority of Castilian Jews only transited via Portugal and were not allowed to settle there by King Joao II.
Chapter 3 covers the period between 1492 and 1496. This section focuses on political and diplomatic events rather than on the Jewish and Muslim minorities. It analyses the complex political developments leading up to, and immediately following, the accession of King Manuel I in October 1495. I argue that there are no grounds to support the assertion that Manuel entertained any ambitions to take over the various thrones of Spain as well as that of Portugal. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the new monarch had two very different aims and ambitions in the first years of his reign: his eagerness to finance a voyage of exploration to India and his obsession with the launch of a new crusade against the Muslims in Morocco. To achieve his two aims, Manuel needed to conclude an enduring peace with Spain and this chapter also carefully analyses the negotiations that took place between Spain and Portugal over the marriage of Manuel to a Spanish Princess. It was as a result of these difficult negotiations that the fate of the Jews in Portugal was decided.
Chapter 4 moves from the promulgation of the expulsion edict in December 1496 to the forced conversion of the Jews in 1497. Using a wide variety of evidence derived from narrative and documentary sources (such as the genealogical sections of Inquisition trial records or Hebrew chronicles), it presents a painstaking reconstruction of the different stages of coercion that gradually led to the forced conversion of all Jews. These stages include the confiscation of all Hebrew books, the abduction and conversion of all the Jewish children and the seizure of communal Jewish property.
Finally, chapter 5 brings into focus the forgotten persecution that is the expulsion of the Muslim minority from Portugal. I present the documentary evidence to support the claim that the Muslims were indeed expelled—a fact contested by one historian in the early twentieth century—and that they migrated either to Castile or North Africa. From there I proceed to argue that there is strictly no evidence to claim that Spanish pressure underpinned Manuel’s decision. I contend that the most plausible hypothesis is that it was an act of propaganda motivated by Manuel’s concern to obtain papal sanction prior to resuming the war against the Muslim rulers of Morocco.
Sources: Narrative and Documentary
Christian Sources
This study will make use of as wide a range of sources as possible. There are only two Christian chronicles that give a detailed, if somewhat brief, account of the mass conversion of the Jews and the expulsion of the Muslims from Portugal. In addition to this it must be observed that the authors of these two works were both born some years after 1497 and were in fact writing more than seven decades later. These chronicles are the Cronica do Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel of Damiao de Gois (1502c.1574) and De Rebus Emmanuelis of Jerénimo Osorio, bishop of Silves in the Algarve (1506-1580).
The impact of the Cronica do Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel on the historiography of the reign of King Manuel I in general, and his treatment of the Jews and Muslims in particular, has been enormous. This work, published for the first time in 1566, is one of the most precious narrative sources for the life of that monarch and for the momentous events that took place during his reign. Damiao de Gois was an educated scholar, who travelled widely throughout Northern Europe, Russia and Italy and met some of the foremost European thinkers of his time. Gdis entered King Manuel’s household aged only nine in 1511 and consequently, unlike many biographers, could boast that he had met the subject of his biography. Furthermore, he commanded considerable favour in Portugal prior to his arrest, trial and imprisonment by the Portuguese Inquisition for the crime of heresy.'? King Joao III (1521-1557) appointed Gois to the position of royal archivist in 1548 and ten years later he was commissioned to write an official biographical account of the reign of Manuel I by Cardinal Enrique (1512-1580), son of Manuel I and Grand Inquisitor in Portugal. The office bestowed upon Gdis was the same position held by a string of celebrated Portuguese chroniclers amongst whom was Fernao Lopes, the first and greatest Portuguese chronicler of the Middle Ages.
This prestigious position allowed him unrestricted access to royal documents during his writing, and it is clear from the Cronica that he carried out considerable research in the royal archives. Damiao de Gois paid enormous attention to detail in his narrative. The itineraries of King Manuel in Portugal and Spain and the dates of important events are all carefully recorded throughout the chronicle. In a few cases, documents of significance are paraphrased or even reproduced almost word for word. Important clauses of the last will and testament of Joao II, for instance, are carefully listed by Damiao de Gois in his chronicle and it is obvious that in the course of his research he was able to consult a copy of it in the royal archives. It is also quite likely that many of the documents to which Gois, as royal archivist, had access may no longer exist and no longer be available to the modern researcher. One of his sources, however, was certainly an anonymous codex written earlier in the sixteenth century that is now conserved in the Ajuda library in Lisbon and which includes a very rough draft of the history of the reign of Manuel."
The Cronica do Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel is written in the style that is characteristic of most humanistic historians and, in accordance with humanistic ideas, Gois generally sought to find rational explanations for events rather than simply interpreting them as the will of God. His work is primarily based on documentation and it is also quite obvious that, in order to acquire information for happenings outside of Portugal, he had read many well-known narratives such as those of Joao de Barros (14961570) and Leo Africanus (c.1492-c.1550).’° It is even possible that the author of the Cronica took the memoirs of the great French courtier, diplomat and historian Philippe de Commynes (c.1447-1511)—indubitably one of the first works of humanistic historiography—as his model.’* As one modern biographer has rightly observed, “Gdis’s thorough study of the records, his unbiased reporting, and his undramatised style express the best features of sixteenth century humanist historiography.’ This does not mean, however, that his work is without faults.
One of the main aims of Damiao de Gois’s chronicle was clearly to revive the memory of the “glorious” reign of “the most fortunate” King Manuel and the extraordinary achievements of the Portuguese explorers during the early sixteenth century. In earlier Latin works published during the 1540s and 1550s Damiao de Gois had already demonstrated his pride in the achievements of his compatriots in India and hailed their military successes.'* When the historical context is taken into consideration, it is quite evident that any Portuguese chronicler writing in 1564 might well have looked upon the reign of Manuel I with some nostalgia as a “golden age”. Portuguese dreams of a successful crusade and territorial conquest in Morocco, inaugurated with the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, had not only ground to a halt but had even suffered major reverses.
The Portuguese were forced to evacuate many of their beleaguered coastal strongholds on the Moroccan coast between 1542 and 1550 in the face of Muslim forces united under the new Sa‘adiyytn (¢) 4a) dynasty, who had established themselves in Marrakech. Moreover, King Joao III had died in 1557 leaving the throne to his three-yearold grandson Sebastian. For over a decade, Portugal was governed on his behalf first by his Spanish grandmother and then, from 1562, by his great-uncle Cardinal Enrique. The regents and their governments successfully maintained political stability and order in Portugal but failed to provide the strong and energetic political leadership that the realm needed to revive Portuguese fortunes overseas. When the Portuguese garrison in the Moroccan fortress of Mazagao was closely besieged in 1562 the dowager queen and her councillors in Lisbon failed to send a force to lift the siege. It was only the great valour of the commander of Mazagio that prevented the loss of yet another Portuguese stronghold to Muslim forces. Elsewhere the situation of the Portuguese was better but it was clear that the heady days of military exploits during the Manueline era were over. The Portuguese continued to expand their territory in Brazil, but at a very slow pace, hindered by a shortage of manpower. In India and the Far East, Portugal managed to hold on to its possessions, and had even been ceded the Chinese territory of Macau as a factory for its merchants in 1557. Nonetheless, Portuguese expansion in the East from the middle of the sixteenth century was more commercial in nature than military.'"? Damiao de Gois and his Portuguese contemporaries could not ignore the fact that the fortunes of the Portuguese sea-borne empire, after decades of remarkable expansion, had been overtaken by the vast Spanish Empire in the New World. Accordingly, the period was one that witnessed a strong nostalgic current in Portuguese literature of which the Cronica do Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel is part. It is not a coincidence that Luis Vaz de Cam6es (c.15241580) published his epic poem Os Lusiadas that glorified the earlier Portuguese voyages of exploration to Africa and India in 1572.
De Rebus Emmanuelis was also written at the behest of Cardinal Enrique and was published in 1571, a mere five years after Gdis’s work. Its author, whose elegant Latin style earned him the reputation of being a “Portuguese Cicero’, was a prominent conservative humanist thinker in sixteenth-century Portugal and he distinguished himself as a political doctrinist, exegete, apologist and militant of the counter-reformation. Yet, despite his manifest intellectual abilities, the value of Osdrio’s Latin biography of Manuel I as a source is undermined by the fact that it shows little originality and extensively used Gois’s earlier work as its own source of information. In the preface to his work the Bishop of Silves gratefully acknowledged the debt he owed to “the great work, vigilance and labour” of the royal archivist.”” Most of the details of the events of 1496-7 related in De Rebus Emmanuelis are exactly the same as those of the previous work of Damiao de Gois. A case in point is the passage in which Osorio relates the arguments for and against the expulsion put forward by members of the royal council. A close comparison of this episode in both works reveals that Osorio’s account of the deliberations preceding the expulsion and the forced conversion of the Jews the following year is clearly little more than a Latin translation of the vernacular account in Cronica do Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel.”! Osorio adds many personal comments on the forced conversion and it is in his own reactions to the tragedy of 1496-7 that his work is perhaps most interesting. By choosing to write his narrative in Latin, rather than in vernacular Portuguese, the main intention of Jeronimo Osério was to render the history of Manuel’s reign into a language that would be understood by learned men in the rest of Europe rather than his own countrymen. Certainly his history aroused considerable interest in the rest of Europe and a number of editions of De Rebus Emmanuelis were published in Cologne, the first one only three years after it first appeared in Portugal.” It is perhaps ironic that this work became far more famous than Gois’s, to whom it owes so much.”
Spanish narratives have generally been overlooked by those studying the history of Portugal. Although they do not directly mention the events of 1496-7, they nonetheless provide interesting information concerning the movement of Jews from Castile to Portugal in 1492 and offer a valuable Spanish perspective on diplomatic relations between the two realms. The first of these Spanish chronicles is the Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Catholicos authored by Andrés Bernaldez, the curate of the town of Los Palacios, near Seville, from 1488 until his death in 1513.% Another Spanish account of the emigration of Castilian Jews to Portugal is to be found in the Cronica de los Reyes Catélicos, written by Alonso de Santa Cruz (1505-1567) in Seville between 1551 and 1553. Santa Cruz’s description of the Spanish expulsion varies only slightly from that of Bernaldez and it is quite evident that he drew much of his information from the work of Bernaldez, just as Osério did from Gois. Finally, it is also crucial to take into account the work of Jerénimo Zurita (15121580). Zurita was commissioned by Philip II of Spain (1559-1598) to write an official history of the Aragonese crown. His annals of the Crown of Aragon end abruptly with the fall of Granada in 1492 but include a very interesting Spanish perspective on the accidental death of the Portuguese crown prince Afonso in 1491 and its political consequences.”
Fortunately, some time after completing the annals, Zurita also wrote a biographical account of the life of King Fernando of Aragon, the Historia del rey don Hernando el Catélico, that serves as a continuation of the annals. This later history gives a fascinating Spanish point of view regarding the tense and tangled diplomatic relations between Portugal and Spain from 1492 to 1497.”° To these Spanish narratives it is also important to add a surprising German source: the detailed travel diary of Hieronymus Miinzer, a German from Niiremberg who travelled through Spain and Portugal in 1494-1495. This journal provides very interesting, albeit somewhat summary, information concerning the situation of the Jewish community of Lisbon in the years immediately preceding the edict of King Manuel as well as surprising information about the state of affairs in Portugal and at the Court during the last years of Joao IIs reign.”
Jewish Sources
No Muslim account has yet been discovered that might provide a Muslim perspective on the expulsion of the Portuguese Muslims but this is, fortunately, not the case with the Jews. The sixteenth century witnessed the elaboration of an extensive Jewish historical literature produced by Jewish exiles from the Iberian Peninsula and their descendants that refers to both the expulsion of the Jews from Castile in 1492 and the dramatic events that took place in Portugal in 1497. These Jewish sources are the “Book of Genealogy” (ONY 1D) of Abraham Zacuto (c.1450c.1510); the “Book of Tradition” (abapn 350) of Abraham ben Solomon de Torrutiel (1482-?); the “Valley of Tears” (237 pny) of Joseph Ha-Cohen (1496-c.1577); the Consolagam ds Tribulacoens de Israel of Samuel Usque (c.1497-c.1567), the “Sceptre of Judah” (ATI DAW) of Solomon Ibn Verga (dates of birth and death unknown), the “Chain of Tradition” (nYapn Now>w) of Gedalya Ibn Yahya (1526-1587) and, finally, the “Chronicle of the lesser Elijah” (SOI 17X 770) of Elijah Capsali (c.1490-1549).** These Jewish narratives are characterised by a strong messianic element and emphasised the role of divine intervention. Whether or not these chronicles can be considered to be “historical” in a modern sense is a moot point but their historical importance to modern historians is an incontrovertible fact.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of these sources is that their authors were almost without exception victims of the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions or the descendants of Iberian exiles. Rabbi Abraham Zacuto was a native of Salamanca who fled from Castile to Portugal in 1492. In Portugal his knowledge of astronomy earned him an honoured position at the Royal court, and a translation of his influential astronomical chart entitled Almanach Perpetuum was printed in the town of Leiria the same year that Manuel decided to expel the Jews and Muslims from his realm. Abraham ben Solomon de Torrutiel was compelled to flee from Castile to Fez in Morocco with his family in 1492 whilst still a young child. A similar fate befell Joseph Ha-Cohen, whose family had fled from Navarre to Italy via Avignon and Gedalya Ibn Yahya, whose family moved from Portugal to Italy in the late 1490s. Others were able to leave Portugal in the early 1500s after spending part of their lives as nominal converts to Christianity. Solomon Ibn Verga, who had also fled from Spain to Portugal in 1492, was forcibly converted to Christianity in 1497 and finally managed to leave the Iberian Peninsula, most probably in 1507. Ibn Verga made his way to the Ottoman Empire and settled in the town of Adrianople (Edirne in modern Turkey) which boasted a sizeable community of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in the sixteenth century. His son Joseph (died circa 1559) eventually published his remarkable work, with additional notes, in 1550. Similarly, Samuel Usque was born in Portugal to Jewish parents of Castilian origin and lived there as a convert until escaping to Italy and reverting to Judaism. In 1553 he published his work in the Italian town of Ferrara. The only one of these Jewish writers who had no known family connection with the Iberian Peninsula was Rabbi Elijah Capsali. Indeed, as the rabbi of the Jewish community of Candia, Elijah Capsali was writing on the distant island of Crete, at that time a Venetian possession. Nevertheless, Elijah Capsali claims to have met and spoken to many of the exiles who had been present in Portugal at the time of the forced conversion.”
The information that can be gathered from Jewish chronicles is supplemented by autobiographical notices in exegetical works and some shorter historical texts. Rabbi Abraham Saba (the dates of his birth and death are unknown) has inserted a fascinating account of his personal experiences as an exile—first from Castile and then as a victim of the cruel events that overtook all the Jews in Portugal five years later—in the introductions and colophons of his exegetical commentaries on the books of Esther and Ruth entitled “A cluster of camphire-”*! It is also possible to include in this category the later work of Imanuel Aboab (c.1555-1628), entitled Nomologia o Discursos Legales, which was posthumously published in Amsterdam. Aboab was the grandson of a Castilian rabbi who, according to Abraham Zacuto, died in Porto a year after arriving in Portugal from Castile. Aboab’s work contains a brief description of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and their mass conversion in Portugal. This description relied a great deal upon the previous works of Samuel Usque and Jerénimo Osorio as its main sources of information but nonetheless also contains some original material.»
Two other short historical passages included in manuscripts held in the library of the Jewish Seminary of America were translated and edited by Alexander Marx in 1908. The first of these, which was probably written by an Italian Jew in southern Italy (possibly Naples?) around 1495, gives an interesting account of the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon. The second text, written by a certain Isaac Ibn Faradj, is a short description of the persecutions in Spain and Portugal which follows a philosophical commentary and extracts from the mystical Book of Zohar. Ibn Faradj wrote a moving first-hand account of the persecution of the Portuguese Jews in 1497.*? More recently, Isaiah Tishby has brought to light interesting information on the expulsions from Spain and Portugal contained in fragments of a messianic-mystical text found in the hoard of documents retrieved from the Cairo Genizah. Its author remains anonymous but from the content of these fascinating fragments it is clear that he was both an eyewitness and victim of the persecution and wrote the texts in 1501 from his new home in Egypt.**
Documentary Sources
The available documentary sources for the events of 1496-7 are exclusively Christian and consist predominantly of documents conserved in Portuguese and Spanish archives. Of particular importance is the national Portuguese archive, the Torre do Tombo. This archive contains a number of collections of particular interest to this study. The registers of the royal chancery (livros das chancelarias) contain a variety of different documents including grants of various privileges by the monarch (cartas de isencdo), royal pardons (cartas de perddo) and even the chapters of the parliamentary assemblies (cortes) that were held at different times throughout Portugal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, this archive also comprises all of the documentation produced by the different tribunals of the Portuguese Inquisition (1536-1820), including the dossiers of trials (processos) which are regularly cited in chapters two and four of this work.*°
Aside from the documents produced by royal chanceries and the Inquisition, the shelves and cabinets of the Torre do Tombo also hold documents originating from the archives of religious foundations which are of great interest, particularly those from the monasteries of Alcobaca, Chelas, Sao Vicente da Fora and Santos-o-Novo. Other collections of documents in the Torre do Tombo include the Leitura Nova, the Nucleo Antigo and the Gavetas. The Leitura Nova, regionally or thematically organised copies of selected documents, was created by the order of King Manuel I with the intention of facilitating access to frequently used chancery materials and only completed during the reign of his successor in 1552.
The Nicleo Antigo incorporates remnants of the documentation originally kept in the cupboards (armadrios) of the royal archives (Arquivo da Casa da Coroa) and contains various law codes of the period including the royal edicts (ordenagées) of Afonso V and Manuel I. The Gavetas (“drawers”) contain short single documents that generally tend to be more formal in character such as diplomatic treaties. Beyond the Torre do Tombo, a number of documents cited in this work are preserved in different smaller archives and libraries in the towns of Evora, Elvas and Porto.*°
A considerable number of documents from the Portuguese Royal Archives were lost during the various upheavals that have shaken Portugal’s history since the end of the fifteenth century. The earthquake that levelled large parts of Lisbon in 1755 also devastated the castle of Sao Jorge and the building containing the royal archives was entirely demolished. In the wake of the earthquake the royal archives, or rather the documents recovered from under the ruins of the castle, were deposited in a temporary building for safekeeping until, at length, they were moved to the Benedictine monastery of Sao Bento in 1757. The extent of the losses is impossible to calculate but they were obviously considerable. In certain cases entire registers are now missing leaving important gaps in our knowledge and these cannot just be blamed on the disaster of 1755. By way of illustration it is known that in 1526 there were 48 extant registers for the reign of Jodo I but that three years later the keeper of the royal archives could find only four registers and these are the ones still extant today.
The registers of King Pedro and his son Fernando also suffered considerable losses in the same period. In relation to the present study, it is particularly unfortunate that the registers of royal documents corresponding to the years 1485, 1493, 1494 and 1495 of the reign of Joao II have disappeared without trace. The last three years were of course those that witnessed the arrival of the Jews expelled from Spain and their loss is therefore a huge blow for any study of the impact of this event on Portugal. In addition to this, substantial losses are also to be deplored amongst the registers of the royal chancery that date from the reign of Manuel I, only two thirds of which are still extant.” Even the surviving documents of the Livros das Chancelarias have not, in some cases, escaped damaged and some of their folios are so damaged as to be very difficult to read or even illegible.**
Numerous documents referring to diplomatic relations between Portugal and Castile in the 1480s and 1490s, such as letters exchanged by the rulers and diplomats of both realms, are conserved in Spanish archives, especially the Archivo General de Simancas located near Valladolid in Castile. Fortunately, most of the documents relevant to relations between the Catholic Monarchs and the Portuguese crown were edited and published by A. de la Torre and L. Suarez Fernandez in Documentos referentes a las relaciones con Portugal durante el reino de los Reyes Catholicos (1963).
These Spanish documents are particularly interesting as the complex diplomatic relationship between Portugal and Castile-Aragon forms an important part of the political context in which the expulsion edict of 1496 was issued by Manuel. Moreover, documents preserved in Spanish archives also provide valuable information relating to the effects on Portugal of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The records of Spanish Inquisitorial tribunals and the royal archives of Castile in Simancas, for instance, provide fascinating evidence of Jewish emigration to Portugal and, just as interestingly, of the return of converted Jews to Castile from 1492 onwards.”
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