logical that merchants—including those of New Christian stock—were visible mainstays of economic life. In the cities, foreign traders (as well as native traders with foreign connections) were usually the ones who supplied indigenous artisans with raw materials and made foreign manufactures widely available to a commodity-hungry public. Wholesalers met local demand for imports such as tobacco and inexpensive fabrics at local plazas and fairs, while petty tradesmen (many of them smugglers) sold all manner of trinkets, toilet accessories, and trumpery in the streets.125
With regard to the economic and ethnic stratification of Spain’s predominantly foreign merchant class, Antonio Dominguez Ortiz has noted,
Between [the] magnates and the miserable buhoneros [sellers of bauble] who traversed the dusty roads of Castile there was a whole gamut of intermediate levels in which we can discern a certain specialization by national origin; usually, wholesale commerce was in the hands of [immigrant] Italians and Flemings, while Portuguese and Frenchmen … were more numerous in medium and small commerce. But exceptions were so numerous that we think it preferable to abstain from generalizations of that nature.126
Converso merchants, including those of Lusitanian origin, tended to dwell within the low and intermediate regions of the commercial sector that Dominguez associates with Portuguese and Frenchmen (in fact, it is conceivable that by “Portuguese” Dominguez actually meant Portuguese Judeoconversos). Again, a handful of Portuguese conversos and their Spanish descendants did belong to the upper economic strata. As royal financiers, administrators, and asentistas (royal contractors), wealthy cristãos-novos reached the peak of their influence during the reign of Philip IV.127 To appreciate how important some of these hombres de negocios were to the crown, suffice it to note that a mere six years after Philip’s accession to the throne—well before Portuguese conversos became his financial backers of choice—ten of them lent the state a total of nearly 1.9 million ducats. That sum represented an imposing 39 percent of the crown’s yearly foreign budget.128 Great financiers and asentistas, however, were not typical of Judeoconverso businessmen, who usually took part in relatively minor trades and associated occupations.
Members of the Bernal de Caño family of Ciudad Rodrigo are examples of a middling yet relatively prosperous type of converso merchant. The Caños descended from agricultural laborers who had emigrated from Portugal at the end of the sixteenth century. In Spain, the men of the family became specialists in trades that conformed to the mixed economy of their town. For instance, Juan Bernal purchased wine and cattle from local growers and ranchers in his role as a supplier of taverns and butcher shops in Ciudad Rodrigo. In addition, he served as an arrendador of lay and ecclesiastical rents.129 So too, we find members of the immigrant Pinero family of Ciudad Rodrigo who dealt in textiles, as their immediate ancestors had done in Portugal, yet combined that “traditional” trade with farming, cattle-raising, and rent collection in their adopted country.130
Further down the socioeconomic ladder, a host of Portuguese conversos, perhaps a plurality, specialized in what one may vaguely call petty commerce. In reality, these simple mercaderes engaged in types of business as diverse but less remunerative than those pursued by the likes of the Bernal Caños and the Piñeros. For example, a converso “stall-keeper” was often also the one who “manufactured” or at least prepared the products he or she sold, such as aguardiente (a type of homemade liquor). Like their more prosperous fellows, struggling converso traders congregated in the marketplaces of Madrid, Seville, and other cities to buy and sell food, manufactures, and services.
Many immigrant conversos made a living exclusively by selling items of foreign provenance, either by offering the merchandise from door to door, or by tending a small estanco (a small, semipermanent shop or stall) supplied by friends or relatives who brought the merchandise from distant parts. For instance, the small family of Simon Fernández, a Portuguese immigrant, lived almost solely by the petty linen trade in Madrid.131 Simon and his two eldest sons worked as itinerant linen salesmen. His daughter Isabel was married to another lenzero (seller of linens) of Portuguese extraction. Only Simon’s brother-in-law, who owned a shop in Madrid’s bustling Calle Mayor, sold miscellaneous items, including semiprecious objects made from a type of processed American silver called solimán. Despite counting on the stability of this estanco the extended Fernández family was not wealthy. Simon’s in-laws were totally destitute and “lived from alms” according to Manuel, Simon’s second son.132 Like his father, Manuel had himself had to fend off penury virtually his entire life: He had sold linens in the streets of Madrid well before reaching the age of ten.133
New Christians like Simon Fernández, who settled in Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took advantage of the centrality of the capital and of the sheer volume of goods and services that were exchanged there. Not surprisingly, the records of the Toledan tribunal of the Inquisition, which encompassed Madrid, contain a host of cases against “Portuguese” lenzeros, estanqueros de tabaco (tobacco stand-keepers), and vendedores de paños (sellers of woven fabrics, usually inexpensive, imported wool).134 The abundance of such cases gives the strong impression that immigrant conversos were especially numerous in textiles, tobacco, chocolate, and other portable, high-demand commodities. The areas of central Madrid in which Simon Fernández and his sons sold linens, namely the marketplaces and residential streets surrounding the Calle Mayor, seem to have developed something of a “foreign” air with the mass immigration of Judeconversos from Lusitania after 1580, as well as other extranjeros (foreigners) throughout the seventeenth century. It is nonetheless unclear whether any areas of the city developed as specifically “Portuguese” sectors.135
A possible reason that it is not easy to find such sectors is that relatively few converso merchants stayed in one place along the course of their commercial careers. Economically and geographically, Spain’s New Christian minority as a whole was extremely mobile. In that respect, Judeoconversos differed from a majority of Old Christians and resembled a multitude of foreigners, chiefly Flemings, Frenchmen, and Italians, who flocked to Spain throughout the seventeenth century, attracted by the prospect of commerce in American and European imports. Of course, a key distinction between these foreigners and the conversos was that the latter were a very familiar part of the socioeconomic landscape of Iberia. By the seventeenth century, most Peninsular conversos were thoroughly Ibericized, that is to say, they were culturally (if not religiously) “Spanish” or “Portuguese.” Their language, public behavior, tastes, and social mores were in line with those of Old Christians of various social classes.136
One advantage that cristianos nuevos (Portuguese and non-Portuguese alike) had over the immigrant foreigners was that they could avail themselves of preexisting networks of fellow conversos whose presence and support throughout the peninsula made commerce in portable goods an attractive and potentially profitable pursuit. Of course, conversos also differed from the foreigners in that they bore an old social stigma and were often legally disabled by reason of their Jewish ancestry.
Conversos in general, and especially the “Portuguese of the Nation,” became the objects of a popular backlash against foreigners as alarm over the political and economic crisis of the Habsburg kingdom grew during the seventeenth century. The backlash manifested itself in various arenas.
Among the educated, eminent social critics struck a xenophobic chord when they bemoaned the fact that immigrant businessmen had become the country’s de facto mercantile and entrepreneurial class. Some commentators were particularly distressed that religiously suspect foreigners such as Frenchmen (possible Calvinists) and Portuguese New Christians (presumed Judaizers) prospered, while native Catholics wallowed in debt. Along these lines, the commentator Tomas de Mercado denounced what he called “our senseless subjection to foreigners in giving them control of all the most important things in the country…. The best properties are theirs … [and] the bulk of the kingdom [is] in their hands.”137 The mercantilist Sancho de Moncada was more specific. For him, the ills of Spain derived
