Meet some 16th-century Mexicans

Modern Noxtepec (formerly Nochtepec)

In 1521 Tomohitecuhtli, the ruler (tlatohuani, in Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue) of Nochtepec, in the modern state of Guerrero, accompanied by various village elders, walked the 160 kilometres to the destroyed Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. They made the journey on foot, because feet were the only available means of transport before the conquering Spaniards had arrived two years earlier. Tomohitecuhtli was accustomed to making this journey because whenever the Aztecs installed a new, more powerful, tlatohuani in Tenochtitlan, or summoned him to some celebration or festival, he would journey to the great city in the lake to demonstrate his loyalty, and his willingness to pay tribute, to the new ruler. Tomohitecuhtli had heard that there was a new, and unfamiliar, kind of ruler now. The document that records his visit calls this man the “tlatohuani Marques”, Hernán Cortés, soon to be honoured as the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca.

Church of Saint James the Apostle, Noxtepec, interior

The tlatohuani Marques received his visitors, offering them “that food of Castile that the elders could not eat”. Instead they took it home and offered it to all the men of the village, but not one could stomach this strange fare. The Marques also introduced the elders to his subordinate tlatohuani, Juan de Cabra de Molina. Cabra, the conquistador explained, would be their encomendero (“trustee”), who would ensure that they were taught the new religion of the Spaniards. In return the people of Nochtepec would pay tribute to him. Cabra ordered the elders to build a temple. Work on the church was completed in 1532, and “thus arrived the religion and our encomendero came” to perform the traditional ceremony of marking the boundaries of the village lands. The church of our Lord Saint James the Apostle still stands, despite earthquake damage over the centuries

 

Church of Saint James the Apostle, Noxtepec

Cabra was a powerful conquistador, who had arrived with Cortés in 1519, and participated in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, as well as the defeat of the warlike Yope people on the Pacific coast of Guerrero. He made his fortune initially in mining, gold on the Pacific coast, but above all in the silver mines of Nochtepec, and nearby Taxco and Zacualpan. His mines were worked by Indian slaves and forced labour provided by the people of Nochtepec and other towns. By 1524 and 1527 he owned properties in Mexico City and a cattle ranch. When he died in 1557 or 1558 he left his properties in Mexico to provide funds “to marry poor orphaned ladies”. His widow, María de Herrera inherited Cabra’s mines and the tribute he received from Nochtepec.

The house of the conquistador Diego de Ordaz in Coyoacán, Mexico City. Cabra's may have been similar

16th-century Mexico City as depicted on a folding screen

Encomenderos were the elite of 16^th-century Mexico. These were rough and ready men, used to fighting, who shared a desire to get rich quick, and to flaunt their wealth. In 1572, the English sailor Henry Hawks described the wealthy mine owners of Mexico City thus:

““The pompe and liberalitie of the owners of the mines is marvellous to beholde: the apparell both of them and of their wives is more to be compared to the apparell of noble persons than otherwise. If their wives goe out of their houses, as unto church, or any other place, they goe out with great majesty, and with as many men and maids as though she were the wife of some noble man. I will assure you, I have seen a miners wife goe to the church with an hundred men. And twenty gentlewomen and maids. They keepe open house: who will, may come to eat their food. They call men with a bell to come to dinner and supper. They are princes in keeping of their houses, and bountiful in all maner of things.”

 

The former house of Hernán Cortés in Coyoacán, Mexico City, now a municipal office building

One such was Gil González de Benavides, who, with his brother Alonso de Ávila (the brothers were born in the Spanish city of Ávila) was among the early adventurers to seek their fortunes in the new continent. In 1509 Gil was in Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean. In 1522 he received a contract from the King to find a route across the Pacific to the Molucas islands. Instead, he landed on the coast of Nicaragua, fought the local Indians and made off with a large amount of gold. However, he made an enemy of Pedrarias Dávila, governor of Golden Castile, as Central America was then known, and fled with his gold. By 1524 Gil was in Honduras, where he founded a town that he immodestly named San Gil de Buenaventura (“Saint Gil of Good Fortune”). Here Gil’s luck seemed to have run out. He was captured by Cristóbal de Olid, who had been sent to conquer Honduras. However, Gil managed to persuade Olid that they should be allies, sat down to dinner with him, and then killed him. He was arrested and sent to Mexico City to be tried for murder, but somehow avoided conviction.

Gil seems to have made a habit of treachery. In Mexico, he was asked by his brother to look after his business interests while Alonso went away to Spain. While Alonso was away, Gil persuaded the Viceroy, the King’s head of government, to transfer all his brother’s wealth to him. Alonso promptly died, leaving his brother with his loot. Gil lived until 1540.

However, the Benavides family did not end well. His youngest son was the first to die unhappily: drowned in a latrine as a child. His daughter, María de Alvarado (she took her mother’s last name), fell in love with a mestizo (mixed race man) of lowly birth. Her two brothers disapproved, gave the man 4,000 ducats and told him to go to Spain and never come back if he wanted to live. Grief stricken, María entered a convent and took vows. In 1566 María’s brothers, Alonso de Ávila and Gil González de Ávila (they took their betrayed uncle’s last name), were executed for their part in a plot against the King’s government. Alonso, apparently, was a dandy who flaunted his wealth and good taste, even on the scaffold. He wore to his execution a velvet doublet, a damask garment embellished with tiger skin, a hat decorated with gold and feathers, a gold chain, a head band with a reliquary, and a rosary. Hearing of the brothers’ deaths, María’s lover returned to Mexico to seek her hand. María could not forsake her vows, so they met secretly in the garden of the convent and agreed to part for ever. The lover stabbed himself to death in the street, while María hanged herself in the convent garden. History does not record in which convent María took her vows. A number of monasteries and convents (in Spanish both are conventos) were founded by wealthy Spaniards in the 16th century. The ex-Convento del Carmen in San Ángel (17th century) and the ex-Convento del Desierto de los Leones (18th-century), were both monasteries of a later date, but perhaps María's convent bore some resemblance to them.

Chapel of the ex-Convento del Carmen, San Ángel, Mexico City. Note the pride of place given to the Virgin of Guadalupe

 

 

The ex-Convento del Desierto de los Leones c.1906-1920

Not all those who conquered 16^th-century Mexico were white Spaniards. Juan Garrido (his name means “handsome John”), was an African, or perhaps mulato, freedman who converted to Christianity in Lisbon. About 1510 he arrived in Santo Domingo, where he spent seven years before moving on to Puerto Rico. He participated in the conquest of Tenochtitlan and joined a force of Spaniards that subdued parts of western Mexico and the Pacific coast. On the coast, he participated in mining enterprises and owned slaves, and also raised pigs. He later moved his mining business to

Modern Zumpango del Río, Guerrero (formerly simply Zumpango)

Zumpango in the mountains of central Guerrero. It might seem odd to our 21st-century sensibility that a black man should be a slave owner, especially since the Spaniards imported African slaves, as well as enslaving some Indians, but slaving was a general practice and Juan behaved like any Spanish conquistador. Garrido next joined Hernán Cortés’ expedition along the Pacific coast to conquer Baja California. Juan married Francisca Ramírez and had three daughters. By 1525 he had a house in Mexico City and owned some land, where he planted the first crop of wheat to be harvested in Mexico. So, Juan did quite well for himself, but his race certainly limited his chances of holding influential public offices: he is recorded as the keeper of the Chapultepec aqueduct that supplied water to Mexico City, and as the doorkeeper of the city council, both lowly, poorly paid positions.

Tasco (modern Taxco de Alarcón) where Castilla first made his fortune

Possibly the richest man in 16^th-century Mexico was  Luis de Castilla, the fourth, but illegitimate, son of King Pedro I of Castile, known variously as “the Cruel” or “the Just. Luis was “entrusted” with a number of Indian towns, but the main source of his wealth was his influence in the highest circles of the government of Mexico, and silver mining. He was described thus:

“A Knight of the Order of Santiago, … whose advice and authority was sought by the Viceroys. He kept a great house, as of a great lord, many horses, servants, arms, dependents and companions, with such grandeur, that it showed he was a great man; and such was the wealth that he had from that mine in Tasco, that he could do all this and anything that his heart desired, for even the most basic dishes in the kitchen were of the finest silver; and he gave more in this life to the poor and to noblemen, than a very liberal king could do.”

He also married strategically, to the sister of the Royal Treasurer.

San Agustín Ohuapan (ancient Oapan), Guerrero

Like Luis, most powerful Spaniards made sure they married well, and that their children likewise married rich and powerful spouses. Indigenous notables also continued to marry well, following indigenous practices, but incorporating elements of the new Christian religion.  In 1535, a delegation of notables from Oapan, in central Guerrero, walked 57km, a journey of 12-14 hours, north to Mayanalán. They had been instructed by the ruler of Oapan to ask for the hand in marriage of Ana Conxochil, the daughter of Alonso Taxtetl, the tlatohuani of Mayanalán. Ana must have accepted, since another delegation from Oapan arrived a few days later to draw up the marriage contract. The formalities done, the representatives of Oapan and Ana’s family walked to the Augustinian monastery in Chilapa, about 140km to the south, to celebrate a Christian marriage ceremony. By the time the happy couple arrived home in Oapan, Ana must have walked a good 220km on tracks through mountainous terrain. She was probably glad to put her feet up for a few days.

Modern Chilapa de Álvarez (formerly simply Chilapa), general view

As part of my study of 16^th-century Guerrero, I have attempted to document as many Spaniards and non-indigenous people who were involved in the 16^th-century economy and society of the region in some way. I found 1014 individuals whose names I could identify. Just over a quarter were priests or friars, a fifth were miners and another fifth royal officials. Slightly fewer were encomenderos to whom towns and villages were “entrusted”. About 100 owned or dealt in slaves.

Some of these men and women became very rich indeed, very quickly. Many were less successful in seeking their fortunes. Priests earned between 69 and 200 pesos per year, most officials between 100 and 300. A craftsman (carpenter, metalworker etc.) in the silver mines received 112-150 pesos, a foreman or mining specialist 300-700. The person lucky enough to be appointed repartidor de indios (“distributor of Indian labour”) earned a princely 2,000 pesos. Mining, was big business, unless you were a lowly Indian salaried worker, whose maximum earnings would be 50 pesos. To put these salaries in perspective, an Indian slave could cost as little as four or five, up to 25 pesos. The price of African slaves varied from 42 to as much as 210 pesos. Animals were more costly. There were only two means of transporting goods: on the back of an indigenous man, a horse or a mule. A horse in Zacatula, on the Guerrero coast, in 1525 cost 310 pesos, a costly item, and a mule in Mexico City in 1536 150.

Sunninghill in Coronavirus Times

Dear friends,

I hope that our friends everywhere are safe and healthy. This morning I ventured to our high street for the first time to collect some things from the pharmacy for ourselves and our "at risk" neighbour. Here are some photos to convey the sense of life in our village.

Daffodils under the crab apple tree in our garden. The leaves on the tree will soon be followed by pink blossom and, later, small red apples, a favourite of the pigeons that poop on our car:

Flowers on Jan's Spring-flowering camelia. She has a winter flowering one at the other end of the garden. Last autumn she researched a Japanese flowering cherry whose buds are quite full. We are waiting for the blossom:

The high street about 09:30. Two food shops are open, as is the pharmacy, and a cafe has converted itself into a fruit, vegetable and eggs shop:

The village school without children:

Upper Village Road, where we live. The big tree is ours:

The Jacobs home:

We are living quietly at home, staying in touch with our sons, friends and family by video call, phone or email. Messages are most welcome

Of pandemics and people

I spent three days last week in Cambridge, mopping up reading for my Mexico project. One book on my list was a 1960 study by Woodrow Borah and S. F. Cook of the University of California Berkeley, The population of central Mexico in 1548. These scholars had estimated that about 23 million indigenous people lived in Mexico when the Spaniards arrived in 1519. By 1548, their estimates suggest that the numbers had fallen to seven or eight million. About 60 years later not many more than one million Indians survived. The reason was a number of pandemics of diseases to which the people of Ancient Mexico had no resistance. Mexicans now have to worry about another disease.

We spoke to our son Chris in Mexico Monday night. Pasitos de Luz, the charity for which he works provides day care and therapy for children with disabilities. Pasitos will extend the two-week Easter break to a month because the government has ordered all schools in Mexico to do so. As far as I know, this is the first action taken by Mexico’s government to restrict the spread of coronavirus. President Andrés Manuel López de Obrador (AMLO) has taken a rather relaxed attitude to the coronavirus. His statements suggest, rather like Mr Trump’s earlier predictions, that the virus is not terribly serious. He has continued to dispense abrazos (hugs) liberally. There is no plan to restrict mass gatherings and events. Monday was a public holiday (Benito Juárez Day, to celebrate the life of a famous 19^th-century president). In San José, Nayarit, near to where Chris lives, there was a funfair, a livestock and farm machinery show, and a rodeo/dance. Chris and his girlfriend went to the dance. The musicians had a new stock of beer-related coronavirus jokes, Corona being a popular brand of beer.

Chris tells us that the people of his region have heard that the virus does not like hot conditions. Since coastal Nayarit is Hot Country, unlike the big cities of the highlands, the hope is that the heat will kill the virus. AMLO has expanded access to public health care, but not increased funding. He has also created a severe shortage of medicines in the public system. I fear that Mexico is not prepared for the pandemic.

Here in the UK, the government seems to have been rather slow to implement measures to restrict the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Johnson initially declined to convene the government’s emergency planning committee (COBRA). Communications have been slapdash. The health minister has used the term-self isolation to mean two very different things: initially, strict home quarantine for anybody with symptoms consistent with the virus, but later a less rigid recommendation than at-risk groups should avoid unnecessary social contact, for example by not attending clubs and social events, avoiding public transport and the like, for a period of several weeks or months. His loose talk created the impression that the government had recommended a sort of home arrest for the elderly. This week, the Prime Minister encouraged us not to go to pubs, clubs, theatres and the like to reduce social contact. He did not mention cafés, restaurants, hotels, cinemas or museums, but these are also places where social contact occurs. He further announced that if a person in a family has symptoms consistent with coronavirus, the entire family should self-isolate for 14 days. In fact, if another family member exhibits symptoms within 14 days, the period of isolation exhibits increases to 21 days. And if within that period another person becomes ill, for another seven days and so on. Our voluble prime minister did not make this clear.

The rapid imposition of increasing restrictions on social and economic life has exposed, for those who care to see, the consequences of the last ten-years of government policy. The UK used to have a robust public health system to address disease and other health matters. The National Health Service was responsible for public health, which was therefore integrated with the broader health service. No longer. Soon after the 2010 election, the government (having promised not to do so) undertook reforms of the NHS. Amongst other things, responsibility for public health was devolved to local authorities, thus fragmenting the system. Since local budgets have been severely reduced, the funding for public health has been decimated. We also have fewer critical care beds, and fewer ventilators, per head of population that most other advanced economies. In short, our health infrastructure has been run down when we need it most.

The crisis has also exposed the insecurity which many of our fellow citizens must endure. If you stay away from work to self-isolate for the public good, as instructed by the government, the statutory minimum pay is £94.25 per week. In Germany and Austria, the rate is £287.35, in Spain £120.69. In the UK for the first three days, the sick person is paid nothing. Nothing is paid if the worker’s income is below a minimum level, nor are you paid if you are freelance or a “contractor”, as many delivery or Uber drivers are for example (probably in violation of unenforced labour laws). These people have been told to apply for Universal Credit, but this pays nothing for the first five weeks. This is a rule, designed by wealthy politicians, to teach the indigent how to manage money they do not have. Everybody else, so the argument goes, must wait a month (but not five weeks) to be paid when they start a job, so this must apply to benefit recipients as well. I can testify that the same politicians do not apply this rule to the state pension, because pensioners are a key bloc of voters.

The Trump administration in the USA has taken even more damaging steps to undermine the health system. The Centers for Disease control is a national network of extremely capable medical professionals and labs. The Trump administration has cut its budget and reduced the number of centres. Under the Obama administration there was a pandemic planning unit within the National Security Council. This no longer exists. The World Health Organization offered the US government its coronavirus testing kit. The Trump administration rejected the offer, preferring to use a kit developed in the USA, which turned out to be defective. The health system is fragmented. Medical treatment is mostly private, controlled by health insurance companies, and not readily available for those who cannot afford insurance. Public health services are fragmented, and in many states managed by small municipal administrations, whose capacity is limited. A friend, who is a public health nurse in New Jersey, tells me that her manager insisted that the coronavirus was just another flu – after all the White House had told him so – until the first death occurred in a local hospital. Mr Trump has variously sought to discount the virus as no worse than the flu, a Democratic hoax, a foreign virus seeded by European travellers, a Chinese virus and so on.

Monday, on my way home from the village bakery, I met a young Spanish woman from Valencia who works in a local convenience store. She told me that several members of her family now have the disease. Valencia, like the rest of Spain, is in quarantine. The family from whom we rent a house for our vacations in Sagunto, about 30kms to the north of Valencia, are likewise confined to their homes.

Here in Sunninghill the virus is beginning to have its impact. Our village florist tells me that flowers are still arriving from Holland (which supplies almost the entire European market). Because almost all shops in Italy and Spain are now closed, sales of flowers have collapsed and the growers have had to destroy large quantities. The florist is very worried about prospects for her business as restrictions in the UK increase.

Jan volunteers at the Ascot Day Centre, which provides social contact, lunch and services such as exercise classes. It has now closed and is making plans to deliver lunch to its members’ homes. We have two neighbours who live alone and meet the government definition of vulnerable: one is 75 and the other well over 90. Fortunately, a number of neighbours have offered them support. Yesterday, a person I have never met put a note through our door offering support if we need to isolate ourselves.

In short, policies designed to reduce the capacity of the state and to strip public services to a bare minimum have been revealed by the virus to be at least unwise, at most a conscious exposure of us all to unnecessary risks. In my country the situation is, of course, made worse by Brexit. Just as we are suffering the worst national threat since the Second World War, our government remains determined to negotiate our exit by 31 December or leave without any agreed arrangements. I suspect that the leaders of other European countries are far too busy with the current crisis to indulge our whims. The government has decided that we will end our membership of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which regulates and licenses drugs for use in the EU. We will have our own agency. Now, when a vaccine against coronavirus is developed, it must be licensed before it can be used. The pharmaceutical companies will, naturally, seek to meet the standards of markets with large populations (the EU, for example) rather than the UK (with a much smaller population). We can expect to receive the vaccine later than would have been the case were we members of the EU. “Get Brexit Done” will thus indulge the fantasy of “Take Back Control” so dear to some of my fellow Britons, and the rest of us must suffer the health consequences.

Dear friends, I hope you stay well., Please keep in touch by email.

PS: the Cambridge University Library,  the British Library, the Anthropology Library at the British Museum and the Institute of Historical Research Library have all closed, or will do so later this week. I will be at home writing for quite some time.

How Long Was an Inquisitor’s Lunch Break?

The answer is an hour and a half. I stumbled across this intriguing fact as I was researching the society and economy of 16^th-century Taxco, a colonial silver mining town in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Taxco’s narrow cobbled streets and superb Church of Santa Prisca attract tourists, but in the 16^th century the town was far from picturesque.

 

Hacienda de San Juan Bautista Amalucan, founded by the wealthy miner Luis de Castilla in Taxco, 1555, to process silver ore

 

Interior of the hacienda of San Juan Bautista Amalucan. Castilla was a relative of the Spanish royal family

About 1530, less than a decade after the defeat of the Aztecs, a rich vein of silver was discovered. Spaniards, eager for a share of fabulous wealth, descended on a small indigenous village, Tlachco el Viejo (“Old Taxco”). They quickly turned the tiny settlement into a polluted town of greedy miners; speculative merchants eager for a quick profit; mule drivers who transported supplies in and silver out, while leaving behind great dollops of mule faeces on the tracks that passed for roads at that time; the priests who offered confession, while sometimes supplementing their salaries with a little commerce or mining on the side; royal officials, supposed to collect the King’s taxes and keep order, but who often were hucksters making money from illegal enterprises.

 

Crushed silver ore is mixed with mercury, using the patio method

Of course, none of these Europeans did any of the hard work. That was done by Indian and African slaves, and indigenous forced labour brought in from towns up to 400km or more distant. The technology was basic and mine work was dangerous. Just as dangerous was the processing of the ore, which contained lead and mercury. Silver was extracted by means of repeated heating, which gave off noxious fumes. Mine workers (inspired to theft by the example of greedy bosses and a general air of lawlessness) stole ore to process at home for sale to Spaniards eager to get a slice of the action. Fumes from ore processing poisoned the miner workers’ families and polluted the water. The demand for charcoal and wood to heat the ore soon striped surrounding hills of trees.

 

The palace of the Inquisition in Mexico City

Lawless Taxco was a good place to escape the long arm of the law, and the even longer arm of the Inquisition. Among those who found a degree of sanctuary and economic opportunities there were a number of Messianic Portuguese Jews. In 1497 King Manuel of Portugal forced all Jews to convert to Christianity. Jews responded, broadly speaking, in three ways: sincere conversion, pretending to be Christians while practising their faith in secret, or fleeing to remote parts, such as Spain’s new American colonies, to practice their religion discretely with as little compromise as possible. One such was Jorge de Almeida, who became quite rich from mining and commerce by the 1580s. Jorge married the 12-year old daughter, Leonor de Carvajal,  of a Portuguese Jew who had fled to New Spain (as Mexico was then known) with his large extended family. It would not be long before the Carvajal family fell foul of the Inquisition, along with Jorge and various of his cousins and other relatives.

 

Artist's impression of the torture of Francisca de Carvajal

Problems began with the arrest of Jorge’s brother-in-law and Leonor’s brother, Luis de Carvajal. Luis clung stubbornly to his ancestral faith. He practiced many of the things that the Inquisition looked out for to indicate that somebody was a crypto-Jew: avoiding pork and lard, fasting on the wrong days, keeping the Sabbath on Saturdays, and, most suspicious, bathing. Cleanliness was decidedly un-Christian. Luis was first arrested and tried by the Inquisition from 1589-1590. The result of this trial was not too serious. He was required to renounce the Law of Moses, to wear a penitent’s vestments, and consigned to a sort of house arrest in a monastery where he taught Latin to sons of members of the indigenous nobility of Mexico City, while secretively consulting Jewish tomes in the convent library. Several members of his family were sentenced to imprisonment, including his sister Leonor, wife of Jorge de Almeida who evaded capture and fled to Spain. In Madrid, Jorge used his influence and money to have the sentences of his wife, mother-in-law and sisters-in-law reduced. He also negotiated a government licence to trade in African slaves. His mining enterprises in Taxco would have depended on the labour of slaves or forced indigenous labour, so Jorge the victim, was not averse to exploiting people still less fortunate than a crypto-Jew.

The Zócalo (main square) in Mexico City where the procession of convicted heretics would begin. The cathedral is to the left. The market is in the foreground.

Luis’ second trial was in 1594-1596. This was a more serious affair with more drastic results. We know a good deal about this and the first trial because the Spanish in general, and the Inquisition in particular, kept voluminous records. The published transcription of the records of Luis’ trials covers some 498 printed pages. The testimony of witnesses is recorded, as is the interrogation of Luis. On 15 December 1595 Luis declared that “He does not believe in the Law of Jesus Christ because he considers it false”. On 8 December at 09:30 Luis was brought for his first session in the Torture Chamber. He was stripped naked except for a pair of linen underpants. The record details each turn of the rope used to inflict pain, and what Luis did or did not say after each twist. At the fourth turn the record states: “Admonished to tell the truth, the order was given to turn the rope for a fourth time, and he complained very much indeed. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! I will tell the truth, I will, Mr Inquisitor”. Luis started to denounce as Jews more than 100 family members and acquaintances. Then, “since it was late and 2pm had struck, the Inquisitors and the Ordinary thought it was a good time to go to lunch for an hour and a half. And with that they left the Torture Chamber, leaving Luis de Carvajal there. “They ordered that he be dressed to cover his nakedness and so that he did not catch cold”, but not, apparently, offered lunch. The Inquisitors seem to be concerned for the decorum and well-being of the man they had just tortured for five hours. They returned at 3:30pm from lunch and resumed the session.

 

An artist's impression of the burning of heretics

There followed further sessions: 8:30am-11am and 3:00pm-5:30pm on 10 February, 9:30-11:30am and 3pm-5:30pm on 12 February. At the end of that session Luis asked for pen and paper. Two days later, at 8:30am Luis presented two pages of written denunciations. This excused him from the rope torture, since the record shows that he was returned to his cell at 9:30.

However, on 14 February, the trial took a surprising turn. Luis withdrew all his denunciations. Asked by the astonished Inquisitors why he had previously accused a large number of people, Luis replied: “to avoid being tortured”. Nevertheless, Luis did denounce two of his cousins, who were miners in Taxco, and another Portuguese, in a nearby town, but he declared that he had no knowledge that a mule driver by name of Marco Antonio was a Jew.

The Inquisitors then sentenced Luis, first condemning him for abjuring all he had promised at his first trial “with the natural ingratitude, stubbornness and perversity of the Jews, forgetting the mercy and generosity that he had received”.

On 8 December, Luis was led out in procession with other members of his family to be burned alive “until he is reduced to ashes, and not even a memory of him remains”. However, Luis was in luck. A Dominican friar, declared that Luis had handed him a notebook, in which he stated that he had converted to Christianity and had withdrawn his testimony against all those he had accused of being Jews. Therefore, “having arrived at the brazier which is in the market of Saint Hipólito, he was garrotted until he died a natural death, so it seemed, and then his body was burned in live flames so that it was reduced to ashes”. So, by the standards of the Inquisition, Luis got off lightly.

Although Jorge de Almeida had evaded justice thus far, he was tried in his absence in 1607. After hearing testimony from witnesses, including Jorge’s sister-in-law Mariana de Carvajal, the Inquisitors decided that an order should be posted on the door of Mexico City’s cathedral. The summons, posted on 18 March 1607, invited Almeida to appear within 60 days before the Inquisition because the Inquisitors “wished him to enjoy health in our Lord Jesus Christ”. The deadline was extended several times. It does not surprise me that Jorge does not answer the summons. The final judgement waited until 3 April 1609, when the Inquisitors ordered the confiscation of all Almeida’s property. They further prohibited any of his children from holding public office. Almeida’s effigy was dressed in penitential robes, a rosary and all other garments and insignia of a convicted and condemned criminal. The effigy was taken in procession, as Almeida’s in-laws had been thirteen years earlier, to be burned and reduced to ashes.

 

The monastery of San Diego, opposite which burnings took place

Jews were not the only targets of the Inquisition. A number of Englishmen, accused of being Lutheran heretics, also appear in the records, some of them in Taxco. In 1564 William Collins, a Welshman, born in Bristol about 1541-1544, was arrested there and sentenced to confiscation of his goods, wearing penitential robes, 200 lashes in public and ten years in the royal galleons. However, he may have been treated more lightly, since one judge voted that he be confined to a monastery to be instructed in “our Christian religion”. In 1574 John Grey, an Englishman born c.1552, who was also in Taxco, confessed to Lutheran beliefs under torture. However, Licenciado Bonilla, one of the Inquisitors, was concerned that Grey may not have fully understood the charges. He was sentenced to be tortured for a second time with the same interpreter.

 

The plaque reads: Opposite this place was the place where the burnings of the Inquisition took place from 1596 to 1771.

Robert Tomson, who was born in Andover, Hampshire, went to Seville in 1553, where he was employed by an English merchant John Fields, with whom he sailed to New Spain. However, their ship was caught in a great storm and the two Englishmen survived only because they were rescued by another ship and landed at the port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Both became sick and Fields died. Tomson found employment in Mexico City with the Taxco miner Gonzalo Cerezo, “a man of great wealth, and one of the first conquerors of the said Citie”. Over dinner, Tomson was asked if it were true “that in England they had overthrown all their Churches and houses of Religion, and that all the images of the Saints of heaven that were in them were throwne down, broken and burned”. Cerezo testified that Tomson had uttered the heresy that one can pray direct to God and need not pray to the statues of the saints for intercession. The Inquisition expelled Tomson from New Spain to Seville, where he landed on his feet, marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who made an enormous fortune in Mexico, which he left to his daughter.

We know from the documents of these cases, that the Inquisitors worked long days, from 8:30 o 9:30am to 5:30pm, that they took an hour and a half for lunch, and that they spent a lot of time in the Torture Chamber. In fact, there must have been quite a few people in the chamber: three Inquisitors, an Ordinary, a scribe to record the testimony and cries of pain, sometimes an interpreter, and a suspect stripped to underwear. The many hours spent by very important people seeking out and persecuting heretics was an enormous diversion of resources. The sheer expense in paper (imported at great cost from Europe) must have been considerable. A 21^st-century European asks: why? Partly, I think because the Spanish monarchy’s legal right to own the Americas as private property was given by the Pope in exchange for propagating the Catholic faith. The church had to evangelize en masse the native population and suppress indigenous heresies, the previous beliefs of the great mass of the population. (The indigenous population, by the way, was safe from the Inquisition since the Indians were considered not to be fully capable and therefore unable to be liable for heresy.) Other heresies were, therefore, serious threats to the entire colonial enterprise. Further, in a country where the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, and where many Spaniards had scant regard for the law, the maintenance of social order, the collection of taxes on which the monarchy depended, and the exclusion of rival, especially Protestant (Lutheran), powers was a strategic imperative. One has only to read the extensive and detailed reports that bishops sent to the King, naming remote humble priests and indigenous villages of which the King would never had heard, to sense the importance of the church as an instrument of rule and control. The church, and therefore the Inquisition, were important tools for the maintenance of order and empire.

 

The manuscripts of Luis de Carvajal

Reading the trial documents, I was rather depressed by the cruelty of which humans are capable, but also moved by the resolution and affection of which the human spirit is capable, even in appalling adversity. In May 1595, a few months before he was tortured, Luis de Carvajal, alias Joseph el Lumbroso (Joseph the Light), got hold of some paper and wrote a number of letters to his family. One letter begins thus:

“Loves of my soul, by a miracle I received today an ink well and pen to write to you this letter to the souls of my heart, which, as soon as you receive, it you can send, with much secrecy, wrapped inside something, to my other blessed ones. They arrested me by the rightful will and judgement of the most high, and because of the accusation of our good Lucena [a prosecution witness already convicted of being a Jew]. They arrested me alone because I did not bear witness against anybody, and because I confessed the truth. And I confess it hoping for the true reward from God, and that I be given in my prison certain important possessions. They arrested you, my souls, my angels, my blessed ones, only on suspicion. I defended your innocence as I would defend my soul from Satan and his assistants, as I swear by the angel of my Lord God.”