Prejudices against outsiders contributed to the periodic eruption of conflicts between travelers and local citizens. Such disputes were especially difficult to restrain in remote places where the reach of police authorities was limited. For example, in rural Huelva during the mid-1550s, vecinos complained that fights between natives and forasteros broke out frequently at local inns. According to the worried villagers, such disorders occurred “without justice or punishment,” even when the confrontations were lethal.89
As if a general distrust of foreigners were not grave enough, the perception that forasteros were inimical to local communities acquired a racist coloring where members of marginalized ethnic groups were involved. Popular stereotypes of moriscos, gypsies, and Judeoconversos as inherently dangerous and deceitful were among the oldest ideological lenses through which Old Christians viewed travelers who belonged to these suspect “castes.” Portuguese conversos were uniquely vulnerable to ethnic and religious hostility in the roads and cities of Spain because they were doubly conspicuous. Old Christian prejudice marked Luso-conversos not only as forasteros (recent Portuguese arrivals often spoke Castilian with a noticeable accent), but also as putative heretics—or more crassly, as “Jews”—by virtue of their Jewish ancestry.
The following episode illustrates some of the perils that Portuguese conversos were liable to encounter while traveling in Spain during the seventeenth century.
The Case of Diego Pereira
On October 15, 1661, two friars appeared uninvited at the house of Francisco Esteban de Cebada, a Toledan inquisitor. The friars, Pedro Mártir90 and Anselmo de la Huerta, informed Cebada that a Portuguese man who had traveled with them from Andalusia to Castile had “done and said some things” that had made them “suspicious of the [man’s] faith.”91
Later that day, the inquisitor summoned Mártir so that the Dominican could relate his suspicions in detail.92 Mártir testified that on the previous Sunday he (Mártir), Friar Huerta, and three others were traveling northward through the city of Ecija when a tall man had stopped them to ask how to reach the highway to Cordoba. The man, who was Portuguese, identified himself as Diego de Silva.93 Mártir told him to follow them, as they too were headed for Cordoba.
The friar continued that when the party stopped to eat at a small country inn, Silva had behaved strangely. According to Mártir, Silva hid behind some wall-matting until the others had finished eating a back of pork. Only then, when the party had totally consumed the pork and the innkeeper brought some cooked rabbits to the table, had Silva emerged from his hiding place to ask if any food remained. When Mártir and the others asked their new road-mate why he had stood behind the matting instead of partaking in the main course of the meal, the latter allegedly did not respond. This made the friar and his companions “suspicious” of Silva.94 Although Mártir did not explain the group’s misgivings, his clear implication was that both he and his traveling partners had smelled the presence of a secret Jew in their midst: Why would a man from Portugal (as opposed to, say, a Spanish morisco) avoid eating pork, unless he were a converso Judaizer?
Mártir recounted that after the group had arrived at an inn in the city of Cordoba, he devised a plan to test Silva. First the friar took out a ham from his road provisions. Then, “with premeditation,” he and his comrades maneuvered Silva to a table and pressured him to eat the ham. Friar Huerta later testified about the incident that Mártir told Silva “you will eat [the ham] because there is nothing else to eat,” to which the latter “made a very bad face,” evidently displeased at the prospect of consuming pork (fol. 7r). Another witness, Diego de Castilla, reconstructed the scene slightly differently. He said that Mártir told Silva that he, Silva, would have to eat the ham “even if he didn’t want to” (fol. 8v).
At one point, Mártir continued, a Flemish fellow traveler by the name of Mathias shone a candle under the table and discovered that Silva had not swallowed the ham but had merely tasted it and furtively thrown pieces of it to the floor. According to Mártir, all the members of the traveling cohort were outraged when they saw the half-chewed scraps under the table, and “started calling [Silva] a Jew” (fol. 3r). To this the Lusitanian allegedly responded with the enigmatic statement that their insults did not bother him because he was a prophet (ibid.). According to Mártir, Silva then took some slivers of tocino (pig fat) that remained on his plate and put them in his mouth, as though to prove that he was perfectly capable of swallowing pork, but spit them out immediately in apparent disgust (fol. 3r–3v).
By October 14, Mártir could no longer stifle his intense misgivings about the Portuguese traveler. When the group arrived at the Castilian town of Malagón, he confronted Silva by asking him if he knew the tenets of Christian dogma. Silva allegedly said that he did not know religious doctrine, and asked Mártir if he would teach it to him. Naturally, Mártir thought it exceedingly suspicious that a man such as the suspect, who had not denied being a Christian and appeared to be more than forty years of age, should be totally ignorant of Christian beliefs. He therefore tested Silva by asking a simple but highly provocative question: Who is God? Silva allegedly answered that God was “the Eternal Father.” Mártir considered this an equivocal rejoinder—he probably interpreted it as a “Judaic” slight of trinitarian doctrine—so he challenged his Portuguese counterpart to say “how many persons were in the Holy Trinity [sic]” (fol. 3v). To this provocation Silva allegedly responded, “Don’t people say that they are three?” and duly named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The friar then asked Silva which of the three holy persons had died. Silva allegedly stood up to think about the question for a moment, and answered with a tentative query of his own: “Don’t they say that it was the Son?” Exasperated and furious at such vacillation, Mártir lashed out at Silva, calling the Portuguese traveler a “Jewish dog,” and threatening to denounce him to the Inquisition (ibid.).
This was not all. Mártir also claimed that Silva had uttered the Christian credo on demand, but that he had stopped short of the end after saying the phrase “creator of heaven and earth.” The friar stated that when he pressed Silva to continue reciting the creed, Silva refused. To Mártir this refusal was conclusive proof that Silva was a Judaizer, since the remaining portion of the credo concerned, in Mártir’s words, “the sin of the Jews” (namely, their unbelief in Jesus’ divinity) and hence contained ideas that a real Jew would be loath to proclaim. Mártir further testified that when he told Silva as much, the latter allegedly repeated his obscure claim that he was a prophet, adding that as such he could live “in whatever law he wanted,” meaning that he could follow any religion he pleased (fol. 4r).
In later testimony, the friar stated that he had asked the suspect whether he was traveling northward to escape the Sevillian Inquisition, which had recently taken many people into its custody (presumably under suspicion of heresy). Mártir maintained that Silva did not answer this challenge, but instead asked a young Frenchman who was traveling with them “if there was an Inquisition in France.” When the youth told him that there was not, Silva allegedly replied, “Well, then [France] is where I am going” (fol. 4v).
Mártir’s deposition continued with a claim that earlier, at a meson in Ciudad Real, Silva had requested a meal and had become agitated when the innkeeper did not give him the food for which he had asked. Cursing angrily, Silva allegedly declared (among other things), “I renounce the Jewish whore who gave birth to me!” Later, on the road to Toledo, Silva’s baggage fell from his mule and became soiled, upon which he allegedly began cursing again, saying such things as “I renounce the law of God!” and blaming Mártir for his trouble (fol. 4r).
Following Mártir’s deposition, the Toledan Inquisition summoned the friar’s comrades to testify about Silva. All of them confirmed the substance of Mártir’s testimony, with a few important variations. According to Mathias Pan y Agua, the above-mentioned Fleming, Silva’s interaction with his traveling mates had been more volatile and physically dangerous than Pedro Mártir let on. Pan y Agua testified,
When Fray P[edr]o asked [Silva] who was God … [Silva] responded that [God was] the Father without saying anything else; seeing this … Fray P[edr]o took out the sword of a youth [who was traveling with the group], and putting it naked