be borne by one or a few beasts.80
Traveling on inadequate roads was an exhausting, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous and expensive affair. Arrieros and other voyagers usually had to pay local highway tolls. Merchants who traveled long distances also had to pay royal customs (usually set at 10 percent) at posts located between Castile, the Basque lands, Navarre, Aragon, and the Andalusian province.81 Of course, traveling comerciantes had to meet the additional cost of any merchandise they purchased on the road, not to mention the cost of food and lodging.
Stays at rural and urban inns, usually called mesones or posadas, were the nightly lot of most merchants who traveled beyond a day’s riding or walking distance. Typical hosting establishments were humble places run by peasants or poor city dwellers, and were known for being filthy and generally uncomfortable. Mesones offered travelers little more than some straw to sleep on, a modest amount of food for pack-bearing animals, and a stall to keep the animals. Local ordinances in many towns forbade the sale of food by innkeepers. Therefore, in order to have meals, guests often had no choice but to purchase uncooked ingredients at local markets and then ask the innkeepers to prepare the ingredients. Alternately, travelers could go to local taverns, whose keepers were infamous for serving rotten and otherwise revolting food.82
The fact that itinerant merchants carried money and commercial goods made these voyagers attractive targets in the eyes of thieves at lodging sites and on the roads. Although Spanish thoroughfares were relatively safe in some areas,83 road banditry was a manifest danger in regions where the disorder of war and civil uprisings had loosened the grip of law and order. Such was the case in Catalonia, elsewhere along the border with France, and as far south as Valencia, throughout the seventeenth century.84
Besides having to beware of bandits, wayfarers had to contend with an understandable sense of isolation as they traveled long distances through alien territory, particularly when they traversed regions as desolate and sparsely populated as early modern Castile. François Bertaut, a traveler from France, observed in 1659 that Castilian villages were so far apart that one could ride for an entire day without seeing a single person.85 It is no surprise that many voyagers banded together for purposes of security and companionship. Even this practice, however, could not erase the stigma of being “foreign” in a country where rural and urban folk were typically prejudiced against forasteros (outsiders).
As Vassberg has explained, local solidarity in early modern Spanish towns and villages was so intense that it encouraged an exclusionist attitude toward anyone who was not a vecino—a taxpaying citizen of the local municipality or federation of municipalities.86 Prejudice against outsiders took many forms. Some forms were patently discriminatory. For example, local officials often fined forasteros more than local residents for violating the same ordinances.87 Rules governing local marketplaces enshrined the spirit of exclusion in similar fashion. A common municipal policy was to prohibit the sale of outside products until local supplies had been exhausted. A corollary to that approach was to proscribe the sale of inside products to aliens until all internal demand had been satisfied.88 Through this and a myriad of similar regulations, protectionism became well entrenched in Spanish towns and villages during the Early Modern Era. This form of economic exclusionism worked against non-native, itinerant traders chiefly by limiting their ability to compete. In all likelihood it also encouraged these traders to specialize in the sale of items that were not available locally.
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
