OF THE JEWS
The affair made an immense impression especially, it would seem, on San Vicente, convincing him of the advisability of forcing the Jews into the bosom of the Church by reducing them to despair. At Ayllon, in 1411, he represented to the regents the necessity of further repressive legislation and his eloquence was convincing.[339] The Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina, promulgated in 1412 and drawn up by Pablo de Santa María as Chancellor of Castile, was the result. By this rigorous measure, Jews and Moors, under savage and ruinous penalties, were not only required to wear the distinguishing badges, but to dress in coarse stuffs and not to shave or to cut the hair round. They could not change their abodes and any nobleman or gentleman receiving them on his lands was heavily fined and obliged to return them whence they came, while expatriation was forbidden under pain of slavery. Not only were the higher employments of farming the revenues, tax-collecting, and practising as physicians and surgeons forbidden, but any position in the households of the great and numerous trades, such as those of apothecaries, grocers, farriers, blacksmiths, peddlers, carpenters, tailors, barbers, and butchers. They could not carry arms or hire Christians to work in their houses or on their lands. That they should be forbidden to eat, drink or bathe with Christians, or be with them in feasts and weddings, or serve as god-parents was a matter of course under the canon law, but now even private conversation between the races was prohibited, nor could they sell provisions to Christians or keep a shop or ordinary for them. It is perhaps significant that nothing was said about usury. Money-lending was almost the only occupation remaining open, while the events of the last twenty years had left little capital wherewith to carry it on and the laws of 1405 had destroyed all sense of security in making loans. They were moreover deprived of the guarantees so long enjoyed and were subjected to the exclusive jurisdiction, civil and criminal, of the Christians.[340] They were thus debarred from the use of their skill and experience in the higher pursuits, professional and industrial, and were condemned to the lowest and rudest forms of labor; in fine, a wall was built around them from which their only escape was through the baptismal font. Fernando of Antequera carried the law in all its essentials to Aragon and King Duarte adopted it in Portugal, so that it ruled the whole Peninsula except the little kingdom of Navarre where Judaism was already almost extinct. It is significant that Fernando, in promulgating it in Majorca, alleged in justification the complaints of the inquisitors as to the social intercourse between Jews and Christians.[341]
While San Vicente and Pablo de Santa María were thus engaged in reducing to despair the Jews of Castile, the other great Converso, Gerónimo de Santafé, was laboring in a more legitimate way for their conversion in Aragon. He had been appointed physician to the Avignonese pope, Benedict XIII, who had been obliged to cross the Pyrenees, and who, on November 25, 1412, summoned the aljamas of Aragon to send, in the following January, their most learned rabbis to San Mateo, near Tortosa, for a disputation with Gerónimo on the proposition that the Messiah had come. Fourteen rabbis, selected from the synagogues of all Spain, with Vidal ben Veniste at their head, accepted the challenge. The debate opened, February 7, 1414, under the presidency of Benedict himself, who warned them that the truth of Christianity was not to be discussed but only sixteen propositions put forward by Gerónimo, thus placing them wholly on the defensive. Despite this disadvantage they held their ground tenaciously during seventy-nine sessions, prolonged through a term of twenty-one months. Gerónimo covered himself with glory by his unrivalled dialectical subtilty and exhaustless stores of learning and his triumph was shown by his producing a division between his opponents.[342]
OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS
During this colloquy, in the summer of 1413, some two hundred Jews of the synagogues of Saragossa, Calatayud and Alcañiz professed conversion. In 1414 there was a still more abundant harvest. A hundred and twenty families of Calatayud, Daroca, Fraga and Barbastro presented themselves for baptism and these were followed by the whole aljamas of Alcañiz, Caspe, Maella, Lérida, Tamarit and Alcolea, amounting to about thirty-five hundred souls. The repressive legislation was accomplishing its object and hopes were entertained that, with the aid of the inspired teaching of San Vicente, Judaism would become extinct throughout Spain.[343] To stimulate the movement by an increase of severity towards the recalcitrant, Benedict issued his constitution Etsi doctoribus gentium, in which he virtually embodied the Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina, thus giving to its system of terrible repression the sanction of Church as well as of State. He further forbade the possession of the Talmud or of any books contrary to the Christian faith, ordering the bishops and inquisitors to make semi-annual inquests of the aljamas and to proceed against all found in possession of such books. No Jew should even bind a book in which the name of Christ or the Virgin appeared. Princes were exhorted to grant them no favors or privileges and the faithful at large were commanded not to rent or sell houses to them or to hold companionship or conversation with them. Moreover they were prohibited to exercise usury and thrice a year they were to be preached to and warned to abandon their errors. The bishops in general were ordered to see to the strict enforcement of all these provisions and the execution of the bull was specially confided to Gonzalo, Bishop of Sigüenza, son of the great Converso, Pablo de Santa María. As the utterance of the Anti-pope Benedict, this searching and cruel legislation, designed to reduce the Jews to the lowest depths of poverty and despair, was current only in the lands of his obedience, but when his triumphant rival, Martin V, confirmed the charge confided to the Bishop of Sigüenza he accepted and ratified the act of Benedict.[344] Nay more; in 1434, Alfonso de Santa María, Bishop of Burgos, another son of the Converso Pablo, when a delegate to the council of Basle, procured the passage of a decree in the same sense.[345] The quarrel of the council with the papacy, it is true, deprived its utterance of œcumenic authority, but this deficiency was supplied when, in 1442, Eugenius IV issued a bull which was virtually a repetition of the law of Doña Catalina and of the constitution of Benedict XIII, while this was followed, in 1447, by an even more rigorous one of Nicholas V.[346] Thus all factions of the Church, however much they might wrangle on other points, cheerfully united in rendering the life of the Jew as miserable as possible and in forbidding princes to show him favor. This was symbolized when, in 1418, the legate of Martin V was solemnly received in Gerona and the populace, with inerring instinct, celebrated the closing of the great Schism and the reunion of the Church by playfully sacking the Judería, though the royal officials, blind to the piety of the demonstration, severely punished the perpetrators.[347]
The immediate effect of this policy corresponded to the intentions of its authors, though its ultimate results can scarce have been foreseen. The Jews were humiliated and impoverished. Despite their losses by massacre and conversion, they still formed an important portion of the population, with training and aptitudes to render service to the State but, debarred from the pursuits for which they had been fitted, they were crippled both for their own recuperation and for the benefit of the public. The economic effect was intensified by the inclusion of the Mudéjares in the repressive legislation; commerce and manufactures decayed and many products which Spain had hitherto exported she was now obliged to import at advanced prices.[348]
VICISSITUDES
On the other hand the Conversos saw opened to them a career fitted to stimulate and satisfy ambition. Confident in their powers, with intellectual training superior to that of the Christians, they aspired to the highest places in the courts, in the universities, in the Church and in the State. Wealth and power rendered them eligible suitors and they entered into matrimonial alliances with the noblest houses in the land, many of which had been impoverished by the shrinkage of the revenues derived from their Jewish subjects. Alfonso de Santa María, in procuring the decree of Basle, was careful to insert in it a recommendation of marriage between converts and Christians as the surest means of preserving the purity of the faith, and the advice was extensively followed. Thus the time soon came when there were few of the ancient nobility of Spain who were not connected, closely or remotely, with the Jew. We hear of marriages with Lunas, Mendozas, Villahermosas and others of the proudest houses.[349] As early as 1449 a petition to Lope de Barrientos, Bishop of Cuenca, by the Conversos of Toledo, enumerates all the noblest families of Spain as being of Jewish blood and among others the Henríquez, from whom the future Ferdinand the Catholic descended, through his mother Juana Henríquez.[350] It was the same in the Church, where we have seen the rank attained
