Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe

Strategies of Exile

Timothy G Fehler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317318699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection of essays looks at the shared experience of exile across different groups in the early modern period. Contributors argue that exile is a useful analytical tool in the study of a wide variety of peoples previously examined in isolation.

1 TRADE IN TOLERANCE: THE PORTUGUESE NEW CHRISTIANS OF ANTWERP, 1530–50

Victoria Christman

Located on the river Scheldt in the southern Low Countries, Antwerp of the sixteenth century was a vibrant and lucrative mercantile centre.¹ Its commercial importance attracted merchants from all corners of the early modern world, including a large community of Portuguese New Christians, who used the port city as a midpoint in the transport of expensive spices from the Portuguese Indies to the Ottoman Empire.² The New Christians seem to have been well integrated into both the civic and religious life of Antwerp. The extant documentation of the period suggests that they participated regularly in Antwerp’s frequent religious processions and were among the more generous donors to the city’s Christian charitable institutions.³ It would appear that the Portuguese needed to exercise few explicit ‘tactics of inclusion’ in order to be accepted into sixteenth-century society. The city welcomed them, surely in large part for their financial contributions to the common weal, and they repaid their hosts in kind, by serving as model citizens and generous civic contributors. Their integration into the community was threatened, however, in the 1530s, when accusations emerged that some of the Portuguese New Christians were actually ‘crypto-Jews’, who lived ostensibly Christian lives but practised Judaism secretly and encouraged others to do the same. These accusations set in motion a lively string of negotiations between the New Christians themselves, Emperor Charles V, his queen regent, Mary of Hungary, and the city council of Antwerp.⁴ During the course of these negotiations, the Antwerp fathers adopted a variety of strategies to defend their New Christian inhabitants. Indeed, they argued in favour of extending various forms of religious forbearance to these valuable merchants, to the point that religious toleration actually became one of their strategies for inclusion of this problematic ‘other’ within their midst. In this particular case, then, the presence of a heterodox religious minority actually served as a catalyst for the development of religious toleration.

Recent scholarship has made a distinction between the development of ‘tolerance’, as an ideological framework or ideal, and ‘toleration’, meaning pragmatic policies that grew in response to specific, local situations.⁵ Several local studies in recent years have lent support to the validity of such a distinction.⁶ The example of the Portuguese New Christians in Antwerp highlights the fact that those we normally view as victims of intolerance (exiles, foreigners, converts) could also serve as the agents of tolerant policies, and that they did so in this particular case for reasons that were fundamentally non-religious.⁷ The initial responses of both the imperial and municipal authorities to the allegations of New Christian apostasy were motivated by issues other than religion or ideology. The Portuguese New Christians were some of the wealthiest merchants in Antwerp, and their financial importance to the city and empire encouraged the ruling authorities to view them with greater indulgence than was otherwise often the case. For his part in dealing with the New Christians, Emperor Charles V gradually moved from an attitude of nuanced leniency to the eventual decision to expel them from his lands. The Antwerp city council, on the other hand, consistently defended the Portuguese New Christians, modifying its arguments in response to the emperor’s changing position. Initially, the councillors focused on the economic importance of the New Christian merchants and the political autonomy of their city. But as Charles became immune even to these considerations, the councilmen came to emphasize the religious aspects of their case, building an argument in favour of toleration that was motivated by politics and economics, but articulated in explicitly religious terms.

The Portuguese New Christians of Antwerp first came under suspicion in 1532, when a boy named Loys Garcez came forward, alleging that his family of Portuguese Jewish converts had come to Antwerp as a pit stop on the way to the Ottoman Empire, where they would renounce their Christianity and revert to their former faith. They were aided, he claimed, by four New Christians in Antwerp who were in the business of facilitating such heretical flight. These four men were among the most influential and wealthiest merchants in Antwerp’s New Christian community.⁸ Chief among them was Diego Mendes. Mendes was a wealthy businessman, the sole distributor of spices for the Portuguese king, with whom he ran an illegal monopoly.⁹ He was also a New Christian, the son of converted Spanish Jews who fled to Portugal during his early childhood.¹⁰ In considering Mendes’s case, Charles found himself torn between fears of New Christian collusion with the Ottoman Turks, with whom he was at war (sometimes in person) during the whole decade of the 1530s, and the Portuguese merchants’ enormous economic contributions to his empire. His actions in this case reflect these competing concerns. For their part, the Antwerp authorities were thoroughly consistent in their support of Mendes and the Portuguese New Christians, even when this brought them into direct conflict with the emperor and his regent, Mary of Hungary. Their support was based on two primary concerns: the first was economic and was shared by Charles. The second, though, was political, rooted in their fears for their own autonomy.

In order to investigate the charges against Mendes, Mary established an imperial commission, which possessed the power if not the title of an inquisitorial body. It was this commission that first drew the ire of the Antwerp councillors, for Antwerp lay in the Duchy of Brabant, a territory that consciously possessed no inquisition. After Charles’s bungled attempt to introduce a centralized inquisition in the Low Countries in the early 1520s, Brabant had secured for itself a stipulation ensuring that an official inquisition would never again operate in the region.¹¹ The fact that Mendes was arrested and detained not by one of their own civic officers, but by this imperial commission, angered and alarmed the council, and they were resolute in providing him aid.

In a letter to the emperor two weeks after Mendes’s arrest, the city council proffered precisely this two-pronged economic and political line of argument. First and foremost, they called upon their common economic interests, reminding Charles of the financial disaster that would ensue if the Portuguese merchants left. This was no feigned concern. On the day after Mendes’s arrest, the leaders of six merchant nations jointly composed a letter of protest requesting that the Antwerp council intervene on Mendes’s behalf, warning the rulers of both city and empire of the financial devastation that would befall them if the merchants’ fears were not assuaged.¹² The Antwerp councillors recounted to the emperor the shocked reactions of these foreign traders, who:

are greatly amazed by these events, saying that the city of Antwerp offers them little protection and that the privileges of the town are fictitious, so that, despite these laws, they can be accused of any manner of crimes. Their persons and goods could be arrested and held by outside courts and judges, in violation of the city’s privileges, as has happened to Diego.¹³

Unless the magistrate aided these foreign traders, they warned, they could never again feel safe in the city.

Having established their economic argument with the vocal support of the foreign merchant community, the city councillors introduced the political basis for their support of Mendes. They reminded their imperial rulers of the extent of Antwerp’s autonomy, the terms of which were long protected by the municipal privileges of the city. On this basis, they claimed that the commission overstepped its jurisdictional boundaries by attempting to transfer (leveren) the New Christian cases from the Antwerp court to the Council of Brabant in Brussels:

this city has been granted many privileges, including the provision that in all legal cases touching body or member (be they civil or criminal), the burghers and other inhabitants of this city ought to be judged by the burgomasters and aldermen … which privileges your Majesty and your predecessors promised to observe and uphold through your Joyous Entries.¹⁴

Both of these lines of argument, economic and political, prioritized the interests of the city council of Antwerp. Mendes’s own lawyer made the same argument, claiming that neither the commission nor the Council of Brabant had jurisdiction over his client, but that the Antwerp magistracy alone should oversee the case.¹⁵ The defence of Mendes was almost a by-product of their own concerns. In none of their correspondence with the court officials did the Antwerp fathers argue that the New Christians were innocent, nor did they claim that the charges against them were unfounded. Rather, their concern centred on the pragmatic defence of the economic health and political autonomy of their city. Thus their ‘tolerance’ of this allegedly apostatizing group of New Christians was, for the Antwerp magistracy, a means of asserting its autonomy against the encroaching imperial power. This negotiation, then, was fought over Mendes and his co-religionists, but the primary concern was not religion or tolerance, but power.

The extant documentation of this case suggests that the arguments of the Antwerp officials were successful in swaying Charles and Mary at this point in time. Immediately following Mendes’s arrest, Charles had issued an edict forbidding his subjects from aiding New Christians who ‘come here [from Portugal] daily, bringing their families and goods with them … and then travel on to Salonica and other places ruled by the Turk, enemy of our Holy Faith’.¹⁶ He reversed this promulgation three months later, however, in light of the economic and political pleas of the Antwerp magistracy. In response to their concerns, he issued new instructions, commanding his officials to discontinue any cases pending against merchants of the Portuguese nation, and forbidding them to initiate new ones.¹⁷ He later strengthened this proclamation, adding that the Portuguese New Christians were to be ‘treated as if they are our own burghers and inhabitants of the said city of Antwerp’.¹⁸ Charles’s about-face following the Mendes affair suggests that at this point in time, economic concerns trumped his fear of apostasy or of his Ottoman foe. As a result, the imperial commission released Mendes and his alleged co-conspirators, albeit for an enormous sum of bail.¹⁹

Although he was swayed in 1532 by the arguments of the Antwerp council, Charles’s patience with the New Christians was to be sorely tested in the coming years, first by the discovery in 1540 in Middelburg²⁰ of a flotilla carrying more New Christian immigrants from Portugal. This enormous case drove Charles from a position of hesitant forbearance to one of determined opposition, in which he could no longer be swayed by economic arguments but instead came to focus on the religious aspects of the New Christians’ alleged crimes.

In December 1540 Jerome Zandelin, receiver (rentmeester) for the emperor in Zeeland, apprehended forty-three Portuguese New Christians recently arrived in Middelburg on a fleet of fourteen ships, the ultimate destination of which was Antwerp.²¹ Zandelin suspected that these travellers were fleeing the newly established Inquisition in Portugal, which had performed its first auto-da-fé earlier that same year. He recognized some of their names from investigations already underway in Antwerp and arrested them.²²

Charles issued an edict in response to Zandelin’s discovery, addressed to the authorities in Antwerp, the eventual destination of the flotilla. This was the first of the emperor’s edicts to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the religiosity of the New Christians. In it, Charles distinguished between those who possessed a verifiable Christian faith and those who simulated Christianity while maintaining Jewish beliefs in their hearts. These latter people, he claimed, ‘are not in fact real Christians but Jews or Marranos who, in the secrecy of their homes, live according to the laws and ceremonies of the Jews … We greatly desire to put a stop to this, because we want good Christians to enjoy our privileges but the Jews and false Christians to be punished’.²³ In none of his previous edicts did Charles so explicitly recognize the distinction between those who pretended Christianity and those who possessed true faith. In this edict he was clearly aware that two groups of New Christians existed, and he remained willing, at this point, to punish only those who were secret Jews.

But Charles’s nuanced view of the situation was to be of short duration. The catalyst of this change was the intensified activity of the new Portuguese Inquisition. In 1544 twenty Judaizers were executed at an auto-da-fé in Lisbon,²⁴ causing a renewed exodus of New Christians from Portugal and a new influx of them into Antwerp.²⁵ Their arrival alarmed Charles, whose view of the Inquisition was far from negative. In his mind it was a legitimate legal body, and consequently he viewed flight from it as tantamount to an admission of guilt. He therefore issued a new edict, declaring that

these people are fugitives from the Kingdom of Portugal on account of the fact that, although they give the outward appearance of being Christians, nevertheless in truth they are Jews, apostates from our holy Christian faith. And some of them leave here, with the intention (as we have heard often enough) of travelling to Germany and Italy, and on to Salonica, and other lands ruled by the Turks, enemies of our holy Christian faith. When they reach these lands, they live as Jews, enjoying the riches they gathered when they lived in Christendom.²⁶

This portrayal of the New Christians contains none of the nuance apparent in Charles’s previous edict four years earlier. In that prior promulgation, he demonstrated an understanding that any blanket description concealed variations of belief, some of which were not unwelcome in his lands. By 1544, however, all such distinctions have disappeared, and here he groups together all the New Christians arriving from Portugal and condemns them as secret apostates. His fears are clearly informed by the claim that these insincere converts are once again using his Netherlandish lands as a midway point in their eventual journey to the Levant – the same charges levelled in the Mendes case twelve years earlier.

As they had in those earlier trials, the city officials of Antwerp rose to the defence of the Portuguese merchants. They refused to publish Charles’s 1544 edict, pointing to the furore it had aroused among the foreign merchant communities in their town, and raising once again their ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I: Tactics for Inclusion
• Part II: Programmes of Restoration
• Part III: Methods of Coping
• Notes
• Index