The New Christians of Spanish Naples 1528-1671

A Fragile Elite

P. Mazur

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137295149
• eBook ISBN: 9781137295156
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European History

This study reveals the more complex reality of Early Modern Naples than what has commonly been represented, in which royal representatives in the city came to depend on the assistance of a series of merchants, financiers, and bureaucrats who shared a common identity as conversos, descendants of converted Jews.

1

From Jews to New Christians: Religious Minorities in the Making of Spanish Naples

Though Consalvo de Cordoba’s spectacular victories over the French at Cerignola and Garigliano in 1503 marked the beginning of the Spanish monarchy’s domination of the mainland of Southern Italy, this new territory did not come easily or immediately under the stable control of the crown. The first decades of the sixteenth century witnessed a level of warfare across Italy which destabilized all of the Italian states and left the population, including élites, in a continuous state of uncertainty while the French and Spanish armies attempted to gain the upper hand. For the entire reign of Ferdinand the Catholic, Naples served more as a base of military command and provisioning for continuing warfare in Northern Italy than as a center of government.¹

The Kingdom of Naples was itself one of the principal causes of Italy’s troubles, a populous and wealthy territory to which both the houses of Anjou and Aragon had ancestral claims. 1527, the year in which troops loyal to Charles V sacked the city of Rome and sent Clement VII into flight, was also the year in which the French launched their last and most dangerous assault on the kingdom of Naples. Under the leadership of Odet de Foix, the viscount of Lautrec, a French army aided by a number of rebellious local barons rampaged through the provinces, leaving behind massive civilian casualties and finally arriving at the walls of the city of Naples in the summer of 1528. After cutting off the city’s water supply, Lautrec and much of his army succumbed to a sudden outbreak of the plague, and the Spanish viceroy managed to stay in control of the city. The French expedition came close to success, and even more disturbingly for the Spanish, Lautrec was able to find a number of supporters among the barons of the Regno, some of whom demonstrated a continued loyalty to the Angevin monarchy, extinct for over sixty years, while others were simply seeking an alternative to Spanish rule.²

However, in the years following Lautrec’s expedition, the Spanish crown rapidly began to re-establish its authority in the kingdom, exploiting the weakened position of France and the peace established at Cambrai in 1529. The rebels were reduced to obedience through a series of confiscations and reprisals, and a new ruling class, composed of newly arrived Iberian nobility and local barons loyal to the house of Aragon, took their place. By the time Charles made his first visit to the city in 1535 there were few traces of the hostility that had so recently threatened the political stability of the kingdom. Under the guidance of a new viceroy, Pedro de Toledo, a new political consensus had been constructed, one that was all too evident in the lavish celebrations and triumphal arches constructed to welcome the Emperor as he descended from Mount Vesuvius into the city.³

The viceroy was an outstanding representative of the Castilian aristocracy, chosen by the Emperor from among his courtiers to bring Neapolitan society and government more resolutely under the control of the central government. His 21-year reign, the longest of any viceroy, marked the definitive passage of southern Italy under Spanish rule, an achievement that earned him a legendary place in the history of the city and of Spain.⁴ As viceroy, Toledo oversaw a massive renovation of the infrastructure and defenses of the city of Naples. A new arsenal and shipyard was built to house the Spanish fleet, the city walls were enlarged to encompass almost twice the amount of land as the previous fortifications, roads were repaved and widened, and the city given a new system of sewers and aqueducts. Swampland in the agricultural plain surrounding the city was reclaimed in order to combat disease and provide more land for agriculture. The viceroy also commissioned new palaces for an expanding court and the tribunals of justice to replace the decaying medieval structures left from the Angevin and Aragonese periods. Over a period of several decades, the revamping of the urban infrastructure transformed the city from the aging capital of a war-torn kingdom into a major regional center of a global empire.⁵

A central feature of the absorption of the city and Kingdom of Naples into the orbit of Spain was an attempt to replicate the policies regarding religious minorities that had been introduced at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain and Sicily. Expelling the kingdom’s Jewish population and creating a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition that was capable of enforcing Spanish religious and social norms were two priorities of the Spanish crown in southern Italy, imposed by Ferdinand the Catholic in the immediate aftermath of his conquest. In the eyes of the king and his successors, these two policies were religious and moral imperatives that were also essential to the foundation of “good government” in the kingdom, no less important than the construction of roads and the collection of taxes.⁶

Yet, in a period full of successes for Spain in the government of Naples, nothing proved more controversial or difficult to accomplish. The inhabitants of the “most faithful” city of Naples and its territory proved unwilling to accept either the expulsion of its Jews nor the installation of a delegate tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition, and resisted the project of bringing the kingdom into conformity with the brand of confessionalized government already established in Spain. In the end, the expulsion was accomplished in 1541 with great difficulty and after a long series of delays, while the idea of establishing the Inquisition was abandoned entirely after a violent revolt in 1547. It would be proposed periodically in the following years by subsequent viceroys, but never actively pursued. There was little support in any sector of the Neapolitan population for the religious politics of the crown; from passive opposition to outright rebellion, reactions to the imposition of these, the most characteristic elements of Spanish government, were almost uniformly hostile.

Furthermore, the expulsion of the Jewish population of the kingdom by no means ended the presence of Judaism in the kingdom. As the Emperor moved against those who openly practiced Judaism in Naples, he favored, even unintentionally, the rise of a different group – the New Christians of the city, mainly immigrants from Iberia, who stood ambiguously between a forced conversion and a full assimilation into Christian society. The events of this period demonstrate a fundamental contradiction of the new regime in Naples. The rapid modernization and centralization that Toledo accomplished depended in large part on precisely those elements that the Spanish sought to eliminate. Both Jews and New Christians performed important functions in the construction of a modern state. Their skill as financiers and bureaucrats, not to mention the raw capital they were capable of bringing from the rural south and from abroad, made them indispensable in a period when the viceroy needed to provide resources not only for domestic expenses, but also for an ever-expanding number of foreign military adventures to which Spain was committed. Much of the history of Spanish Naples in this period is driven by this fundamental contradiction, which pitted the governors of the city and their Iberian masters against the very forces in society which had most to contribute to their success.

* * *

The expulsion of the Jews from the Regno di Napoli in 1541 was the culmination of a long process of political negotiation that revealed, in almost every phase, the essential role which Jews played in southern Italian society and the heavy cost of any attempt to remove them. While Spanish authorities used the lines of credit furnished by Jewish lenders to finance the centralization of government in the hands of the viceroy, programs of public works, and foreign military ventures, they also steadfastly moved toward an elimination of the Jewish presence in the Regno in fulfillment of the religious mission of the monarchy as the defender of Catholicism. In a contest where neither side possessed enough strength to prevail immediately, both the Jews and the monarchy parried back and forth for several decades.

The first attempt at expulsion came immediately after conquest. In the chaotic aftermath of the battle of Cerignola, Ferdinand the Catholic had attempted unsuccessfully to order the departure or conversion of the entire Jewish population of the Regno, in order to bring the kingdom in to conformity with his other territories, including the Kingdom of Sicily, where he had issued a similar decree in 1492. He ordered an expulsion in March 1504, only a few months after the conquest had been completed, and again in 1510, but neither was successfully carried out. And after attempting to use the Sicilian Tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition to pursue suspected crypto-Jews in the Regno, the viceroy also attempted to found a tribunal of the Inquisition, a project which was also abandoned in 1511 following protests both by aristocrats and the Neapolitan populace.⁷

The failure of these policies was due in part to the precarious political situation of the kingdom during this period, but the main reason for the difficulties they encountered was that the Kingdom of Naples was a territory with a long history of well integrated and successful Jewish communities. The kingdom’s Jews had received particularly good treatment at the hands of the Aragonese kings, Alfonso and Ferrante, and the number and importance of the Jewish communities there had increased even further on the heels of the exodus of a large number of Jews from Iberia and Sicily in the wake of the 1492 expulsion in Spain and the forced baptism in Portugal in 1497. By the time of the Spanish takeover of the kingdom, Jewish lending enterprises could be found across southern Italy, where they performed an essential role in local economies, and several important Sephardic families, headed by the Abravanel clan, had come to settle in the capital. Furthermore, many Jews had acquired the trust and sympathy of native élites in the Regno, who made opposition to expulsion of the Jews a part of their own political program.⁸

Two texts written during this period gave voice to this consensus among local élites. Both were written by humanists, members of the academy founded in Naples by Giovanni Pontano who were nostalgic for the tolerant, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Aragonese court. Antonio de Ferrariis (1448–1517), known as il Galateo, defended both Jews and New Christians in a Latin epistle entitled De Neofitis. The letter was written for his patron and fellow humanist, the Duke of Nardò, whose son was preparing to marry a woman from a New Christian family. Through a philosemitic reading of Paul and a reflection on Christian history, de Ferrariis argued that not only were Jews unworthy of the ugly stereotypes that had been placed on them by Christian polemicists, but that they were particularly well suited to Christianity, a religion which had grown out of their own. Speaking as a representative of an “ungrateful Latinity,” de Ferrariis provocatively asked his reader “if we are Christians, if we profess openly in the temple daily to be of the seed of Abraham, if we honor Christ as master and lord, then why do we abominate the Jewish race, the most virtuous and just among all the barbarians?”⁹ He implored his reader to love his future daughter-in-law, to instruct her in good manners and Christian doctrine, safe in the knowledge that she came from a noble lineage.

Tristano Caracciolo’s pamphlet De Inquisitione expressed many of the same concepts. Caracciolo (1437–1522), a friend of de Ferrariis and a fellow member of the Accademia Pontaniana, appropriated arguments made against the Spanish Inquisition in previous decades, pointing out that the lust for power and greed that had accompanied the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition made it into an instrument that damaged, rather than served, the causes of orthodoxy and true religion. The irregularities in the conduct of trials and the facility which with they could be corrupted by private interest and subornation of witnesses inevitably “frustrated” the noble goal of the defense of true religion for which the tribunal was created. Caracciolo’s text was a pre-emptive strike against the plan of Ferdinand and his successors to install a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in Naples and an attempt to convince the educated to look beyond the religious imperatives of the tribunal and consider its actual political import.¹⁰

Both of these treatises demonstrated a sympathy for the Jewish communities of the Regno that had its roots in the tolerant atmosphere of the courts of Aragonese kings of Naples and lasted into the midsixteenth century in spite of the Spanish takeover of the kingdom. The attitudes expressed by de Ferraris and Caracciolo were carried forward by a surprisingly resourceful group of representatives of the Jewish community and by nobles who advocated on their behalf. Pressure on the Jews of the Regno diminished considerably during the Italian wars, and by the 1530s the communities of southern Italy had regained much of what they had lost previously.

When he became king in 1516, Charles was convinced of the necessity of expulsion, but discovered like his grandfather that political support for the Jewish community ran deep in the kingdom. In 1533, he issued a formal decree instructing the kingdom’s Jews to prepare to leave or convert, but no sooner had it been made public than a barrage of appeals arrived in Spain, imploring that the monarch reconsider his position. Many of these appeals came from Jews, but many did not. There were plenty of Charles’ subjects in Italy who recognized, as Caracciolo had before, that Jewish lending was a source of prosperity for the entire Regno that could not be easily eradicated without significant consequences for the economy as a whole. The city council of Naples made a formal appeal to the monarch, and Fernando de Alarcon, the Marquis of Valle Siciliana, a Spanish aristocrat who had arrived in Italy with Consalvo de Cordoba, wrote a brief on behalf of the Jews as well.¹¹ Charles decided to postpone the expulsion for a year.

A further constraint on the monarch was his government’s increasing reliance on Jewish financiers. Though Pedro de Toledo shared the monarch’s religious sensibilities, as an administrator he came to depend on the financial skill and resources of Samuel Abravanel, the leading representative of the exiled Portuguese Jews, in his administration of the kingdom. By extending enormous loans to the treasury of the kingdom, Abravanel managed to acquire a privileged position at the court of the viceroy and served as the informal leader and protector of the Jewish community of the city and the Regno. While the decision to rely on Jewish finance was taken by Pedro de Toledo on his own initiative, Charles could scarcely object, given his own lack of resources and dependence on the Regno as a source of revenue for the financing of his military expeditions in the Mediterranean. The military expedition that Charles led to Tunis in 1535 was financed through a loan of twenty thousand ducats that the Abravanel and several associates extended to Pedro de Toledo in return for a renewal of the charter to the Jews of the Regno established in 1520. Pedro sent the terms of the financiers to Charles, who approved them but insisted that the agreement not be immediately announced. Charles agreed to allow the Jews to reside in the kingdom for another ten years, and left open the possibility that the charter might be renewed again.¹²

By 1535, an uneasy truce had settled into place. While Charles himself became ever more preoccupied with the problem of irreligion and heresy, he also had to confront the overextension of his military and lack of resources and arrive at a successful compromise. During his first and only visit to the capital, from November 25, 1535 to March 21, 1536, Charles privately demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with the presence of Jews in his kingdom, while he publicly avoided confronting the issue and even demonstrated a degree of benevolence toward the leaders of the Jewish community.¹³

Shortly after the Emperor’s arrival in the city, Juan de Figueroa, a member of the central governing council of the kingdom, the Consiglio Collaterale, informed the sovereign of the outcome of his investigation of accusations of crypto-Judaism in the port of Manfredonia. Figueroa revealed to the king that not only were the accusations well-founded, but that the problem was much more profound that he had initially recognized: there were many other “Christians only in name” living in southern Italy who lay outside the reach of any ordinary tribunal, and who continued to commit grave sacrileges. The Emperor took Figueroa’s findings seriously, and left a series of instructions on the government of the Regno for the viceroy upon his departure, instructing him to pay special attention to the Jews of the kingdom, who behaved with “too great authority and license” not only in the capital, but in the provinces as well. Not only did Jews converse and interact freely with Christians, but Jewish men dared to engage in sexual relations with Christian women, “committing rape, incest, and adultery against our authority and that of God, and bringing the danger of infecting the entire Christian religion with their blood.” As much as heresy, it was the threat of ambiguity and impurity which bothered the sovereign, worried that the “infection” of crypto-Judaism, having been eliminated in Spain, might develop in a new, more virulent form in southern Italy.¹⁴

Fears of crypto-Judaism and Jewish impurity were largely kept in private, and the Jewish population did not receive much attention in the public debates and conversations on the government of the Regno in which the Emperor took part. The sole exception was a public disputation at the synagogue between the rabbi and Charles’ confessor, Antonio de Guevara....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. From Jews to New Christians: Religious Minorities in the Making of Spanish Naples
• 2. Conversos in Counter-Reformation Italy
• 3. “El de los Catalanes”: The First Campaign against the New Christians, 1569–1582
• 4. The Rise of the Portuguese Merchant-Bankers, 1580–1648
• 5. The Inquisition against the Vaaz
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Documents from the 1569–1581 Campaign
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index