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2. The Inquisition Comes to Teruel

 


The convivencia we have seen in fifteenth-century Teruel, the shared experience of individuals from three different religious traditions, was not universally applauded. We have already encountered episcopal concern in the archbishop's letter to Teruel about Christians and Muslim butchers. As we might expect, however, the real challenge came from those within the Church charged with finding and treating heresy: the Inquisition.

 1

The Spanish Inquisition

 

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Papal Inquisition had had authority within the various kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon. Under Isabella and Ferdinand, the Inquisition became a Spanish one, with the crown instead of the pope appointing inquisitors. This Spanish Inquisition was established first in Castile; in 1483, the Spanish Inquisition was extended to the Crown of Aragon, 1 at the request of Ferdinand, who ruled there. As an institution that operated in both Castile and Aragon, it was immediately rendered suspect in Aragonese eyes. 2 According to the Aragonese, the Papal Inquisition had successfully controlled heresy in Aragon for several centuries. 3
 

Despite the objections of his subjects, Ferdinand was able to persuade the pope to revoke the old commissions, and the king went on to name Tomas de Torquemada Inquisitor General for the Crown of Aragon, a position he already held in Castile. Initially, then, the Spanish Inquisition was closely identified with Castile's interests and with Isabella's religious policies. Neither of these affiliations would make the Inquisition popular with local authorities in Aragon.
 

The first locations selected by the Inquisition were those where people of Jewish ancestry were a significant part of the population or of the local power structure. These included Barcelona, Valencia, Saragossa, Calatayud, Daroca, Barbastro, and Jaca. 4 Although it was at the southern end of the kingdom of Aragon, Teruel was also one of these locations, and so it became an early target.
 

The Inquisition Arrives in Teruel

 

Torquemada's power to name inquisitors was extended to Aragon in October, 1483, but it was not until Ferdinand summoned the Cortes to Tarazona, in April of the following year, that the new Inquisition actually began to operate in Aragon. 5 The town council of Teruel sent Gonzalo Ruiz, a young jurist and the son of one of the town's notaries, to represent Teruel at this meeting of the Cortes. They met from April 14 to May 4, with the newly named officials of the Aragonese Inquisition present. 6 By the time Ruiz returned to Teruel, on May 18, the Inquisition had begun in Aragon. 7 Ruiz reported to Teruel that inquisitors were "coming to conduct the Inquisition with the same disorder they inflicted upon Castile, bringing with them the selfsame regulations, unfair and contrary to all law." 8
 5

Teruel's town council met on the 21st to hear Ruiz's report. On May 23, the inquisitors arrived in Teruel, as Teruel's historian Antonio Floriano tells us, "with executioners, weapons, and nooses." 9 While Floriano paints a forceful image of this party, the inquisitors themselves were prudent enough to find lodging outside the city walls, in the monastery of the Mercedarians.
 

Defenses Against the Inquisition

 

These inquisitors, Solibera and his assistants, eager to begin the Inquisition in Teruel by preaching the initial sermon, instead found themselves meeting repeatedly with local officials, who understood from the beginning that their best defense against the Inquisition was not physical force, but paper and ink and the law. 10
 

The town council asked for a letter of introduction from the king. The members argued that, since no document they had been given identified the inquisitors, they had no way of knowing whether those who stood before them were inquisitors or not, and then they referred to one of them as "this man who says that he is an inquisitor." 11 Solibera, after three weeks of legal roadblocks constructed by local officials, found himself locked out of Teruel, not only by paper and ink and the law, but also by the walls and gates of the city. 12 He retreated to Cella, a small village down the road from Teruel. He was protected there by a bodyguard, Juan Garces de Marzilla, a citizen of Teruel and a member of one of its more prominent families.
 

Solibera's Aragonese Inquisition had one important point of continuity with the Papal Inquisition that had operated previously within the Crown of Aragon. It continued to use the Manual for Inquisitors written by Nicholas Eymeric, a Catalan. 13 The stated target of the Inquisition, whether it was the Papal Inquisition or the later Aragonese Inquisition, was heresy. In the Manual, Eymeric links the idea of heresy to the idea of division, of being cut off from the community. Much earlier, Isidore of Seville had argued that a heretic was one who deliberately cut himself off from communal life. Eymeric argued that if there were heresy, then there ought to be division imposed upon the heretic immediately: he ought to be isolated from the rest of the community.
 

We have seen, however, that Teruel had a history of resisting divisions imposed upon the town by outsiders. Minorities lived and worked throughout the town, protected by its laws and its single wall, just as the majority Christian population did. In fact, if we examine the "paper and ink" defense of Teruel, which we will do shortly, we discover that this theme of unity and boundaries recurs in the documents. For the moment, we should consider Inquisitor Solibera's action as he settled in the village of Cella, in late June 1484. He issued an order excommunicating the entire town of Teruel. Not only had the town council succeeded in blocking the entry of the Inquisition; they had also forced it to regard Teruel as a single entity, an entire city that deserved to be cut off from the communal life of the Church.
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Teruel was able to reverse this excommunication; it also sent messengers off to the king and to the Cortes. But from the summer of 1484 onward, Ferdinand—and Isabella, as well, who sent letters directly to Teruel 14 —took the offensive. Pen and ink could delay the Inquisition, but not indefinitely.
 

June saw messages from Teruel to cities and villages throughout Aragon, asking for support in petitioning the king. 15 By July, Teruel had submitted its legal brief, and royal officials were seeking local allies in the region around Teruel. 16 In October, Ferdinand began to lobby for a papal bull, which would give the Inquisition the absolute right to act within Teruel. He also asked the Archbishop of Saragossa, his illegitimate son, to continue the interdict against Teruel. By December, the king had declared the town council of Teruel "rebels and protectors of heretics," and had issued a decree banning any written protest to the Inquisition, on pain of death. 17
 

On March 21, 1485, almost ten months after his initial attempt, Inquisitor Solibera finally entered the city of Teruel, and after attending mass in the church of Santa Maria, city officials swore to him that they would assist the Inquisition in persecuting heretics. 18
 

Teruel's reaction to the new Aragonese Inquisition was not quite as unique, or as radical, as it may appear from this narrative. In fact, Isabella herself had faced just such a "rebellion" while staying at Vitoria the previous year. Isabella, her chronicler Pulgar tells us, was accustomed to ride about the countryside, "dispensing justice." 19 That this justice was royal justice, rather than a confirmation of local rights, may be inferred from the events that occurred one evening. Returning to the city with her party, the queen found the city gate closed to her. A local representative explained to Isabella that, unless she would confirm their local rights, the gate would have to remain closed. The queen graciously removed her glove and swore upon the Bible that she did confirm these rights, and the city gates were opened with great rejoicing.
 

The defense of local rights, or fueros, was more typical of Aragon than of the lands Isabella ruled, and in the case of Teruel the refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Inquisition is often seen as a characteristically Aragonese example of this defense of fueros, the rights granted by the Crown to towns immediately after the Reconquest. We saw evidence earlier that these fueros were important to those who lived in Teruel. Fueros not only protected the rights of individuals within the town; they also allowed a town rights with respect to the Crown, and one of the first acts of newly crowned Aragonese monarchs was to visit their kingdoms, confirming the fueros of each city. It is thus interesting to note Teruel's initial objection to Inquisitor Solibera was precisely that he was not the duly authorized representative of the Crown—that is, initially the city acknowledged the authority of the king, precisely because it allowed them to challenge Solibera's authority.
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Other historians have examined Teruel's rebellion in terms of the local power structure. Many of the wealthier and more influential members of the town council were married to converted Jews. William Monter remarks, in his discussion of Teruel:
 

One hears much about intermarriage between old-Christian noblemen and the daughters of converso lawyers and merchants (Teruel's principal conversos often combined both functions), and also about the narrowness of urban elites. Both phenomena occurred throughout the Crown of Aragon. But it is impossible to imagine them so vividly combined as in Teruel, where the Inquisition became a lethal and ultimately double-edged weapon in settling family quarrels. 20

 

It is certainly true that many men in Teruel were married to women of Jewish ancestry, including, for example, Gonzalo Ruiz, Teruel's representative to the Cortes of Tarazona, and Juan Garces de Marzilla, the captain who was appointed to act as a bodyguard for Inquisitor Solibera. There is no doubt that intermarriage between people of various religious traditions—one of the traditional tests of assimilation and accommodation—was a fact of life in Teruel. But rather than considering old-Christian-converso 21 marriages as a confirmation of Teruel's convivencia, Monter focuses upon the fortunes of some of the more prominent converso families in Teruel. In doing so, he neglects one theme that appears in every document produced by Teruel during this rebellion: the attempt to draw boundaries, to define their community in terms of members and non-members, insiders and outsiders.

 

Defining Teruel

 

We have seen previously that Teruel was characterized by its convivencia, both in the physical arrangements of the city and in its degree of tolerance for the beliefs of other religions. Antonio Floriano characterized this convivencia as "absolute, complete convivencia, for which we have no equivalent example in the history of Spain." According to Floriano, the city's various residents lived in a "cordial, almost fraternal" relationship with one another, and if this were true, then an attack on any group might be perceived as an attack on Teruel itself. This is the theme we see stated in the documents again and again. Thus, the most important boundary drawn during these incidents was clearly the one between the community and the outside world.
 

We know, and the residents of Teruel must have suspected, that they had not been chosen idly. Clearly there were individuals within the town targeted by the Inquisition before any sermon was preached there. 22 The town, however, persisted in regarding the Inquisition's arrival as an affront to and an attack upon the town as a whole. If we need confirmation of the convivencia discussed in the previous section, and described by Floriano, there is no better evidence than this solidarity in the face of outside authority.
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Walls and Territory
 

At its most obvious level, this solidarity was expressed in territorial terms. The Inquisitors who arrived from Saragossa initially did not enter the town at all, but instead settled outside the city walls, in a monastery. The city was well aware of the importance of territory and jurisdiction. In arranging meetings with the Inquisitors, the city council limited the Inquisitors to two possible venues. The one named first was the plaza outside the church of Santa Maria, where the council was "accustomed" to assemble. Alternatively, the Inquisitors could choose to confer with the council in the upstairs room leased for some of its meetings. 23 The Inquisitors, showing good military sense for churchmen, selected the closed room. As a result of their refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Inquisitors, Teruel won what might be considered a territorial victory; the Inquisitors abandoned the shadow of the city walls and retreated to Cella, a village 18 kilometers distant. 24
 

We know already that Juan Garces de Marzilla of Teruel was appointed as Captain to ensure the Inquisitors' physical safety there, and he abandoned the city to accept this appointment. In doing so, he provided Teruel with a story that incorporates two favorite elements, love and death, while demonstrating to historians the true nature of Teruel's territorial defense. Teruel is notably fond of stories about itself, having provided plots for Boccaccio, among others, from the local lore. This particular story concerns how Garces de Marzilla, having left Teruel to protect the inquisitors, came back under cover of night to visit his wife, who was dying. The story is reminiscent of other such nighttime adventures in times of siege, such as Ibn-Khaldun's being lowered by ropes down the city walls of Damascus after dark so that he could visit with Tamerlane, who was holding the city captive. 25 Garces de Marzilla knew Teruel. There were places where the city wall was crumbling, and Garces, using a rope, was able to climb from the ravine through one of these openings in the wall. His presence, and his method of entry, were discovered when a relative recognized him leaving his house, early in the morning. The story of Garces is more than a romantic tale. It indicates that Teruel's walls were far from an absolute physical barrier in the late 1400s. Closing the city gates to the Inquisitors was thus probably more a symbolic act than a physical barring of entry. The question was one of inclusion or exclusion, based upon acknowledgement of the rights of the community. Those who were willing to confirm a town's rights could be included in it; those who denied or violated the fueros were outsiders, and were denied access to the community, symbolically as well as physically.
 

The Serrania
 

Teruel's legal defense in the face of the Inquisition also reflected the attempt to define community boundaries and membership. One of Teruel's arguments, the one made in the "Exceptiones de Jure," drawn up for submission to the Inquisitors, attempted to create a boundary for Aragon which would exclude Teruel, thus negating the inquisitors' authority to act there. Teruel had been, after all, a frontier city, established on the leading edge of the moving frontier between Christianity and Islam. The idea of frontier in Spain included not only physical location but various other attributes as well. Thomas Glick explains, in his Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, that, well into the thirteenth century, the frontier was "not only a real entity, but a set of perceptions which influenced attitude and action on both sides." 26 According to Glick, these perceptions included the idea that the frontier was a locus desertus, an area of no population where the normal activities of humankind—in particular, cultivation of the earth—did not occur. This deserted land was not a place that most men would choose to settle. Monks from the monastery of San Cugat, northwest of Barcelona, described the frontier in the eleventh century as a place "of great terror and trembling." 27 In his Historia de Aragon, Ubieto's description of the spirit of the frontier within Aragon echoes this; Ubieto refers to the frontier spirit as an "espiritu de abandono y pánico." 28 In the first centuries of the Reconquest, the kings of Aragon encouraged the settlement of the frontier, the abandoned lands recently won from the infidel. In fact, because it was so important to settle these territories with a civilian population, significant concessions were granted to the settlers in the form of rights. Within Aragon, these rights were known as fueros. Teruel was one of these frontier cities, resettled in the wake of Jaime I's conquests, with a fuero dating from 1276. 29 In recognition of its status, Teruel was fortified during the first years of Christian settlement, becoming surrounded by the wall we have mentioned previously. 30 That Teruel saw itself initially as being on the frontier is indisputable and, what is more, well into the fifteenth century it continued to be regarded as part of the frontier by the Crown. 31
 

Thus, one way to deny the Aragonese Inquisition the right to act against citizens of Teruel was to affirm Teruel's essential "frontierness," arguing that Teruel was, in truth, not a part of Aragon. In his Chronicle, Jaime I had written, "... And, leaving Teruel, we went into Aragon." 32 As far as the author of Teruel's "Exceptiones de Jure" was concerned, several centuries later little had changed, and, in fact, those who traveled from Teruel to Saragossa were still in the habit of saying that they were "going to Aragon." Under this view, Teruel was not Aragon; it was "the Serrania." Teruel's city council was not only willing to draw a verbal boundary line for Aragon, somewhere to the north of Teruel; it was even willing to put its explanation into acceptable Latin. 33

 

The assertion that no one considered Teruel to be part of Aragon may have been an exaggeration, but the argument that Teruel was, in truth, part of "the Serrania" reaffirmed Teruel's frontier identity. Located some distance from Saragossa, and close to the Valencian and Castilian borders, Teruel continued to see itself, in some sense, as the frontier for centuries after the battles had moved southward. And in claiming that Teruel was completely separate from the Kingdom of Aragon, its officials were attempting to redefine the boundaries of the town and of the kingdom.
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Good Cities and Bad Cities
 

Other redefinitions that followed the sudden appearance of the inquisitors were not so much attempts to redraw territorial boundaries as they were efforts to classify, to "sort," the kingdom of Aragon. Thus one of the first letters sent by Teruel's city council expressed surprise at Teruel's having been singled out by the Inquisition. Teruel was not an evil town, but a "good" town. In fact, everyone knew that there were towns far more evil than Teruel in Aragon. In discussing this, Teruel's town council members were quick to point out that no one could claim that they had found disorder in Teruel, for there were cities in Aragon far more tumultuous, without honor or respect. 34 Teruel appears to have considered itself a good city, not a disorderly place without honor; it was populated by faithful Christians in no need of examination or reformation. In fact, Teruel had had a fairly tumultuous fifteenth century, and would certainly, in the months to follow this initial protest, merit a reputation for causing a great deal of turmoil within the kingdom. Teruel here seems to ask, rather plaintively, "Why us?" A part of the answer may lie in the very remoteness of the city, and its relatively small size. The Inquisition did not expect trouble here. But, in Teruel's protest, we can almost hear Biblical echoes, if we recall the egregiously wicked reputations of Sodom and Gomorrah. Teruel was certain that it was not quite wicked enough to be destroyed utterly. 35 The alternative vision of Aragon, then, put forward in the town council's letter, was of a realm that consisted of "good" and "bad" cities. In this instance, Teruel was willing to consider itself a part of Aragon, and, indeed, to consider itself one of its "good" cities.
 

Wheat to the Miller

 

In thinking about the arrival of the Inquisition, and their protest against it, the town council of Teruel tried to explain why they were unwilling to submit to the Inquisition. They were responding to the classic question of all accusers: Why not submit? If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. But the town of Teruel, quite fearful, explained its position with an analogy that made perfect sense to them.
 

The land around Teruel was either grazed or farmed. Some of it, as we have seen previously, was planted in vines, but wheat was grown in quantity, and so the process of harvesting and milling it was familiar. How to explain Teruel's fear of the Inquisition? They were all anxious, they claimed, because it was as if the pope and the king were the millers, and their ministers were the carters bringing the wheat to the mill, and the people of Teruel were the wheat itself. The wheat, claimed the town council, had good reason to wonder whether it would be ground, or threshed, or what would happen to it.

 

While it is a striking analogy, it seems at first to have nothing to do with limits or boundaries. But like the division of Aragon into good and bad cities, this analogy had scriptural overtones. The gospels tell us that the sheep are not to be separated from the goats, nor the wheat from the chaff, until the last day—the Judgment day. The subtext, then, of this analogy, is a warning about the limits the Inquisitors, as ministers of the pope and the king, were about to transgress. In winnowing the chaff of Teruel from its wheat, they would be engaging in an activity reserved in time for the end of the world, and reserved for God alone.
 

In its initial foray into southern Aragon, the Inquisition attempted to draw a boundary between the conversos, the converted Jews, of Teruel and Teruel's Christians. The Inquisition sought to prosecute those who continued to follow customs and practices that were perceived as Jewish. Teruel, in its response to the Inquisition, attempted to negate the distinctions the Inquisition was making. Marriages between old-Christians and conversos were quite common in Teruel; even at the family level, the distinction between conversos and the rest of Teruel's population was artificial. But the idea of boundaries, of limits drawn, or made explicit, by the community, went further than this. Teruel was willing to define itself as one of the "good" cities of Aragon; alternatively, it was willing to deny that it was part of Aragon at all. In each case, the town was creating an identity for itself in opposition to the Inquisition's view of it.
 30

In fact, Teruel went even further, and suggested boundaries for the Inquisition. In referring to the pope and king as "millers," it cautioned that the Inquisitors might be transgressing a different type of boundary, one set not by Teruel but by a much higher authority. The Gospel parable reserves the right to judge between good and bad, sheep and goats, or wheat and chaff; it is not man's right, but God's. In an ultimate sense, Teruel implied, the Inquisition had exceeded its authority.
 

I would like to be able to tell you that the city of Teruel succeeded in its regrouping against the Inquisition, that its conceptual boundaries proved to be as formidable as any city wall. But in fact, although the inquisitors initially retreated to Cella, down the road, eventually they prevailed. There were three autos da fe held in Teruel in the months following Solibera's entry into Teruel. During the first, on August 30, 1485, six individuals (Berenguer Ram, Gonzolvo Ruiz the elder, his son Gil, Juan Ruiz' widow, another Ruiz, and Violante Santangel, his wife) were executed in effigy. Statues dressed in black representing them were burned, and many of the conversos of Teruel were jailed by the archbishop. 36 On January 7, 1486, the feast of Saint Julian, another group died "in the faith of Christ, asking for mercy, with a piety good to see." Their confiscated goods were sent to the Crown. 37 Finally, on the 4th of March, four women, each the wife of a prominent man in Teruel and each wearing a purple veil with a red cross on it, were sentenced to perpetual incarceration, in front of a great group of officials, citizens, and strangers. In the end, Teruel's resistance proved futile.
 

The story of Teruel's fight against the Inquisition is well known within Aragon. It is generally considered that Teruel defended its fueros and local liberties against an institution that was Castilian, rather than Aragonese. But Teruel's resistance to the Inquisition is rarely read as an affirmation of the idea of convivencia. It is as if this part of the story has been forgotten, as if the division the Inquisition imposed between different religious traditions in Teruel had always been there, as if Teruel's convivencia, of which were have seen abundant documentary evidence, was no more than a myth.
 

Perhaps we have been too willing to accept without question the categories imposed upon Aragon by the Aragonese Inquisition. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the formidable support of the Crown allowed the Inquisition to triumph over local resistance. In our own time, the abundant documentation it left behind has resulted in an unavoidable privileging of Inquisition attitudes toward minorities. But, if we can accept that convivencia was alive and well in Teruel before the Inquisition arrived there, then perhaps we ought to look for other evidence of tolerance and convivencia within southern Aragon, continuing forward into the sixteenth century. Was Teruel an exception, a long forgotten example of three religious traditions sharing a common life, or were Jewish converts—and later, those newly converted from Islam—spiritually heterodox and inherently foreign?
 

To answer this question, we will travel north from the city of Teruel to the Jiloca river valley, in order to examine two small villages, Baguena and Burbaguena, and the way life was lived in these villages in Aragon's sixteenth century.
 35



Notes:

Note 1: The Crown of Aragon, the lands ruled by Ferdinand II, included not only the kingdom of Aragon, but also Catalonia, Valencia, and a number of other entities.  Back.

Note 2: As a contemporary Aragonese historian writes of the imposition of a single institution over Castile and Aragon: "In fact, neither did the Crown find itself in a similar situation politically, nor were there comparable economic structures, nor were there social similarities; the one common denominator was the more or less numerous presence of minorities, in quite different circumstances, which happened to continue to practice Jewish rituals after their conversion—forced in the majority of cases—to Christianity." ("Ni practicamente la monarquia se encontraba en situation similar, ni economicamente las estructuras eraa comparables, ni socialmente se observan concordancias; el unico denominador compartido era la presencia mas o menos numerosa de unas minorias, muy diversamente clasificadas en la sociedad, que en aspectos secundarios seguian practicando ritos judaicos a pesar de so conversion, forzada en la mayoria de los casos, a la religion cristiana.") J. Angel Sesma Muñoz, ed. El establicimiento de la Inquisicion en Aragon, 1484-1486: Documentos para so estudio (Saragossa: Institucion Fernando el Catolico-C.S.I.C., 1984), 17. Sesma Muñoz goes on to explain that even this similarity was not significant, given the diverse circumstances in which minorities found themselves in Castile and in Aragon.  Back.

Note 3: William Monter, in Frontiers of Heresy, tells us that the Papal Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon also produced some inquisitors of excellent reputation, including Ramon de Penyafort, who was declared a saint, and Nicholas Eymeric, author of the Manual for Inquisitors (4).  Back.

Note 4: Manuel Sanchez Moya, " La Inquisicion de Teruel y sus judaizantes en el siglo XV," Teruel, 20 (1958), 148.  Back.

Note 5: Antonio Floriano, "El Tribunal del Santo Oficio en Aragon: Establicimiento de la Inquisicion en Teruel," Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia, 87 (1925), 544-605.  Back.

Note 6: Gaspar Inglar and Pedro de Arbues were the Inquisitors General for the Crown of Aragon. Floriano (1925), 548.  Back.

Note 7: In fact, by the early summer of 1484, Torquemada's Aragonese inquisitors had already held two autos da fe in Saragossa. Monter , 5.  Back.

Note 8: "... venian [a Teruel] a fer la Inquisicion con el deshorden que lo han fecho en Castilla y que aquellas mismas reglas trayan, iniquisimas y contra todo derecho." Floriano (1925), 550.  Back.

Note 9: " ... con sayones, con armas y dogales." Floriano (1925), 552.  Back.

Note 10: In Monter (1990), 7.  Back.

Note 11: Floriano (1925), 560.  Back.

Note 12: Floriano reports that the gates were closed, guards were posted, and officials agreed to night patrols, just as they did in the most dangerous times of war. "Se cerraron las puertas, se pusieron guardas y los officials acordaron rondar de noche como en los mas azarosos tiempos de guerra." Floriano (1925), 569.  Back.

Note 13: Eymeric's manual was used by the Aragonese Inquisition until 1555.  Back.

Note 14: Floriano (1925), 590.  Back.

Note 15: Sesma Muñoz, 61.  Back.

Note 16: Sesma Muñoz, 66-71.  Back.

Note 17: Sesma Muñoz, 81 ff.  Back.

Note 18: Floriano (1925), 605.  Back.

Note 19: Fernando Pulgar, Cronica de los reyes catolicos, edited by Juan Mata Carriazo (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1943), 98-100.  Back.

Note 20: Monter (1990), 9.  Back.

Note 21: Converso is the Spanish term for Christians of Jewish ancestry.  Back.

Note 22: For insight into what these charges were, see "La Inquisicion de Teruel y sus judiazantes en el siglo XV," Teruel, 20 (1958), 145-200. Manuel Sanchez Moya examines some of the charges leveled against Brianda de Santangel, the wife of Juan Garces de Marzilla, and her sisters. Santangel's parents had been converted to Christianity by Vicente Ferrer's preaching, but Jewish converts in Teruel continued to follow Jewish customs and dietary laws after their conversion.  Back.

Note 23: Teruel had two locations for meetings, one suited for the more limited consejo, or town council, and one for a more general town meeting. Floriano (1925) 555, n. 1, explains that consejo meetings could be either public or private. Public meetings were signaled by ringing the bells, and citizens were thus invited to attend, although they could not participate. The private meetings of the council were held indoors in a closed room. Town meetings, signaled with trumpets or by a public crier, were held in the plaza of Santa Maria in good weather, with the elected council at the top of the stairs, at the entrance to the church of Santa Maria, and the rest of the town in the plaza. All of the meetings with Inquisition officials in 1483-84 took place in the closed room.  Back.

Note 24: Previous studies of the events at Teruel have not made note of Ferdinand's order to the Jews of Cella. Knowing that the Inquisitors were to settle there, Ferdinand ordered all Jews resident in Cella to abandon the city. They were given three days to leave. The idea of convivencia was apparently not universal in Aragon.  Back.

Note 25: Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Khaldun and Tamerlane, their historic meeting in Damascus, 1401 A.D. (803 A.H.) (Berkeley: University of California, 1952)  Back.

Note 26: Glick (1979), 65.  Back.

Note 27: Glick (1979), 62.  Back.

Note 28: But Ubieto also argues that this initial fear and trembling was later replaced with a more entrepreneurial attitude toward the locum desertum. In 1226, by way of illustration, Ubieto tells us, Jaime I offered Blasco de Alagon "como vuestra propria heredad, franca libre e immune, cualquier castillo o villa que pudieseis capturar o robar, gratis o por fuerza,o de cualquier modo que pudieseis in tierra de los sarracenos"—whatever fortress or town you are able to capture or plunder freely or by force in whatever way you are able in the land of the Saracens [you may take]as your own tax-free patrimony.— (from Fernando Arroyo Ilera, Blasco de Alagón y el comercio de la reconquista valenciana). Dread, apparently, could in some cases be overcome by greed.  Back.

Note 29: The document itself, in Latin, is dated 1276, but parts of it appear to be more recent. See Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Historia de Aragon: La formacion territorial (Saragossa: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1984), 258-259. Ubieto claims that those sections using the term "civitatas" could not have been written—or perhaps copied—before 1350, when Pedro granted Teruel the status of city.  Back.

Note 30: Although it was in need of repair in the late fifteenth century, the wall continues to stand today, even after the heavy Civil War shelling of the past century.  Back.

Note 31: Teruel was established as an aduana, or customs point, by the Cortes of 1376; it remained part of the customs network into the fifteenth century. See José Angel Sesma Muñoz, "La fijacion de fronteras economicas entre los estados de la corona de Aragon," Aragon en la edad media (Saragossa: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1983).  Back.

Note 32: See Antonio Floriano's "El Tribunal del Santo Oficio en Aragon," Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia, 86 (1925), 575.  Back.

Note 33: "... hec provincia non est Regnum Aragonum, sed quedam provincia de per se seperata in totum a prefato Regno Aragonum... in nomine quia vocatur Serrania, et quia ad ysta decesit ut ad civitatem Cesaraugustum proficiscatur dicit se discendere a Serrania et ad Regnum Aragonum proficisci; et quia hic nascuntur et habitant non dicuntur nasci nec habitare in Aragonia, sed in Serrania." "This province is not the kingdom of Aragon, but the said province is itself completely separate from the kingdom of Aragon in name, because it is called the Serrania, and because when someone leaves here to go to Saragossa, he says he is leaving the Serrania and going to the kingdom of Aragon; and because those who are born here and live here are not said to be born nor to live in Aragon, but in the Serrania." In El establecimiento de la Inquisición en Aragón 1481-1486: Documentos para su estudio, edited by J. Angel Sesma Muñoz (Saragossa: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1987), 54. The document was originally published by Antonio Floriano, and so is preserved.  Back.

Note 34: "... ellos no havian hallado albolotes en esta cuidat, porque huvyessen a dezir que havian venido a otras ciudades mas albolotadas, sino servicio, honras y acatamientos...." Teruel council meeting of May 25, 1484. Sesma Muñoz, 47.  Back.

Note 35: In later messages to the Crown and to the surrounding towns, Teruel described the depopulation and ruin it expected to see as a result of admitting the Inquisition. Sesma Muñoz, 61.  Back.

Note 36: Sesma Muñoz, 194.  Back.

Note 37: AHP Teruel, Libro de los Jueces de Teruel, Seccion Concejo, varia 27, in Sesma Muñoz, 195.  Back.

 

Like Wheat to the Miller: Community, Convivencia, and the
Construction of Morisco Identity in Sixteenth-Century Aragon