the Spanish crown was experiencing financial difficulties. Although a majority of Portuguese conversos were far from affluent, their total assets, including the fortunes of a few powerful families, may have totaled up to 75 million ducats.13 In favoring religious amnesty and encouraging immigration, then, Philip sought to draw wealthy conversos toward the Habsburg court so that their economic activities and sheer assets would provide a healthy stimulus to the Spanish economy. Whether the stimulus proved healthy or not, Philip was entirely successful in catalyzing it.
Especially during the middle decades of the seventeenth century the crown tapped the fortunes of Portuguese conversos as a matter of course in order to replenish the coffers of the Spanish state. For some royal officers, bartering governmental concessions for ready cash became a matter of naked self-interest as much as a matter of national economic strategy. Thus, for example, Philip’s prime minister, the Duke of Lerma, received an unofficial gift of fifty thousand cruzados from moneyed conversos for his role in the negotiations that paved the way for the papal pardon of 1604. For their part, each of the members of the Royal Council for Portugal received sixty thousand cruzados.14
There is ample evidence that wealthy Judeoconversos took advantage of the royal aperture to Spain, especially after the coronation of Philip IV (1621–65), whose first prime minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, inserted a number of them into the monarchy’s financial and administrative machinery.15 These prominent hombres de negocios (businessmen) were very few, however, compared to the multitude of ordinary Portuguese conversos who flocked to Castile and Aragon upon the Spanish annexation. What drew the less affluent cristãos-novos to Spain?
As Yosef H. Yerushalmi has observed, Castile-Aragon was wealthier than Portugal, so the lure of economic opportunity must have been substantial to rich and poor cristãos-novos alike.16 From a legal and political standpoint, Spain was most attractive to Portuguese Judeoconversos because the Spanish Inquisition did not punish any crimes committed in Portugal against the Catholic faith—even if Spanish inquisitors did make use of evidence collected by their Portuguese colleagues when prosecuting the immigrants for religious crimes allegedly committed in Spain. Also, Spanish authorities seldom extradited Inquisitorial prisoners to Portugal.17 Finally, in Yerushalmi’s words, “relative to the fury of Inquisitorial persecution in Portugal, Spain must have appeared … almost a refuge.”18 All of these factors meant that Portuguese New Christians enjoyed an enticing measure of legal immunity in Spain at the close of the sixteenth century. Such immunity would have been unthinkable in earlier times, when the Spanish Inquisition was most active against the first generations of Spanish Judeoconversos.
Before delving into the repercussions of the Portuguese migrations and drawing a collective portrait of rank-and-file converso immigrants, we must consider the historical context in which the migrations occurred. The three sections that follow outline the social and economic conditions that awaited Portuguese newcomers in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century—and awaited converso returnees throughout that period. A majority of the returnees I have studied were merchants who traveled to and from Madrid, and were living there at the time of their arrest or self-surrender. Consequently I devote the second of the three sections to an overview of conditions in the Spanish capital during the 1600s. The third section pays special attention to the network of commercial roads that converso merchants used, including the highways that linked the metropolis to New Castile, to the rest of Spain, to the neighboring kingdom of Portugal, and to the most accessible of all converso havens in Europe: southwestern France.
Spain at the End of the Golden Age
Historians have referred to the period from 1500 to 1650 as Spain’s Golden Age (edad de oro) or Golden Century (siglo de oro). Among other things, these terms remind us of the fact that during that period Castile extracted vast quantities of gold from America and spent them lavishly in Europe.19 Arguably Spanish dominance in the European continent, like the empire itself, would have been impossible to maintain without continuous access to the mineral treasures of the New World. At the very least it is evident that the flow of American gold and silver helped the Habsburgs to keep the Spanish economy afloat, to finance an ambitious foreign policy, and to fight several wars.20
The sheer bulk of the treasure that Spain absorbed during the Early Modern Period tells its own tale. According to a recent study by Jean-Paul Le Flem, the Spanish economy imported an astonishing 151,561 kilograms of gold and close to 7.5 million kilograms of silver from 1503 through 1600.21 Especially during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, this unprecedented influx of precious metals triggered a steep increase in prices across Iberia and ultimately throughout western Europe. Despite the resulting inflation, the overall effect of gold and silver imports on the Spanish economy was beneficial at first because Spain’s productive capacities and its population had reached a peak in the 1550s. In other words, during the later 1500s there was sufficient demand for food and services that the bullion fueled an economic boom. Higher prices led to increased profits. Inflation also spurred trade and production, and brought more money into circulation. This, among other things, resulted in lower rates of interest and an increase in productive investment.22
Throughout the Golden Century various Spanish thinkers interpreted their country’s political success and newfound wealth as a sign that Spaniards were God’s chosen people. They believed that España was the standard bearer of Christianity, since Spaniards had “discovered” and Christianized remote regions of the world while resisting internal and external threats to the (supposed) religious homogeneity of the country. These threats included Moorish power (during the reconquista) and Protestant “heresies.” In light of Spanish faithfulness, the argument went, was it not right and proper that Spain was the world’s strongest Christian state and the avant-garde of the Counter Reformation?23
In 1601, for example, the Jesuit political observer Pedro de Rivadeneira explained that God had rewarded Spain with good fortune because in 1492 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile had previously expelled Moors and Jews from Spanish domains. Specifically, Rivadeneira argued that God had showed his pleasure by forever “cleansing” Spain of heretical Christian sects (such as the Protestant groups), and by “giving [Spanish kings] new realms, discovering with His hand a new world with treasures so many and so great that it is one of the greatest miracles that He has bestowed.”24
From such heroic conceptions of nationhood other commentators inferred that Spaniards would redeem the world in a proximate future. For instance, in 1619 the commentator (and friar) Juan de Salazar concluded that the Spanish nation was heir to God’s scriptural promise to the chosen people.25 “It is very consistent with reason,” Salazar wrote, “… that at the world’s end Spain should be the seat of the Universal Monarchy, which … all nations must obey….”26 To underscore the supposed validity of his prediction, Salazar adduced several items of “proof.” The first six of these items are typical of the adulatory triumphalism that gripped many Spaniards of his generation:
First … [we know that Spain will redeem the world because of] the situation of the Catholic King [Philip III], which, more than that of any other Christian prince, puts him in position to obtain [the universal monarchy], because he is lord of so many lands and provinces and of so many rich and great realms and states in all four corners of the world.…
Second … [we can infer the king’s divine mission from] the title that the Church has given him, Most Catholic King, which means and signifies universal king.
Third, [we know of Spain’s divinely ordained role from] the solid and fundamental causes (godliness, prudence, and fate) that concurred in the creation of the Spanish monarchy.…
Fourth … [we can infer Spain’s divine role from] the catholic and sincere faith that [Philip] professes, without admixture of error or heresy, and [from] the singular obedience he shows to the pope, Vicar of Christ on earth,
