of these individuals make up what we know for certain of Duran’s circle of students and correspondents, which was probably considerably larger.
LATER CAREER
At some point, Duran seems to have left Perpignan to work as a doctor among the wealthy and influential members of Christian society, first as a royal physician in Navarre and later returning to the Crown of Aragon. It is easy to imagine the professional and political connections with influential Aragonese that Duran might have developed after twenty years serving the royal house. His connections would have meant lucrative work as physician to notables in northern Iberia. Between 1404 and 1411 there is no record of Duran’s presence in Perpignan.71 In 1406 a maestre Honoratus Bonafidey was summoned from Tudela, where he was living, to Pamplona to aid in treating the king of Navarre, and retained at an annual salary of 300 florins. He remained at the Navarrese court until, it seems, the second half of 1408.72 These moves should not on the face of it be too surprising. In general, Catalonian Jews were highly mobile and many belonged to extended families with branches in numerous cities and smaller towns.73
After returning to Perpignan in 1411, probably for business reasons, Duran appears again as a medical professional with connections to centers of power. On April 22, 1412, he was a minor participant in the events of the so-called Compromise of Caspe, a town close to Saragossa and about halfway between Perpignan and the city of Valencia. There, nine representatives, three from each of the Aragonese realms (Catalunya, Valencia, and Aragon proper), were to choose a new king. After a chaotic two-year interregnum, succession to the Crown of Aragon was finally settled, ultimately in favor of the Trastamaran Fernando I.
At some point during the proceedings, one of the Valencian representatives, Giner Rabasa, was declared incompetent due to advanced age; one of the two physicians testifying to Rabasa’s mental state was magister Honoratus Bonefidei of Perpignan.74 The other was magister Jerónimo of Alcanyís (magistrum Geronimum, ville Alcanicii), whom we should identify as the former Jew Joshua ha-Lorqi, mentioned above. Joshua ha-Lorqi was a native of Alcanyís, he was a doctor, and as noted he adopted the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe upon his conversion to Christianity.75 It is even thought that ha-Lorqi’s conversion to Christianity took place in 1412 in the town of Alcanyís itself, approximately eighteen miles from Caspe, and under the sponsorship of none other than the preacher and anti-Jewish agitator Vicent Ferrer.76 Indeed, Ferrer was the second representative from Valencia, and a partisan of Fernando. At this point in April 1412, ha-Lorqi’s conversion would have been quite recent, and it would have been natural for him to have accompanied Vicent Ferre to Caspe.
It seems almost too much to contemplate these two famous converts working together on a medical case, consulting each other’s professional opinion and presumably making some sort of conversation while in each other’s company. One of them, whatever his state of mind at that point in 1412, had spent years being internally loyal to Judaism; the other had just completed his voluntary and evidently sincere conversion to Christianity. Did the two conversos find themselves on opposite sides in an argument over Judaism and Christianity? Or did Honoratus have to pretend to agree with Jerónimo with regard to the “errors of the Jews”? Tantalizingly, it was evidently around this very year that Jerónimo decided to encourage Pope Benedict XIII to hold a public debate—what was to become the infamous Tortosa disputation. Did something about the encounter between these two prompt Jerónimo’s decision? It is of course impossible to say.
After Caspe, Duran may have continued on to Valencia, where a magister in medicina Honoratus de Bona Fe registered his will (no longer extant) on May 26, 1427. Presumably he had remarried; a wife Saura was named as his sole heiress. Honoratus de Bona Fe died in Valencia January 20, 1433.77 He would have been in his late seventies.
One wonders why Duran left Perpignan, first for an apparent absence of almost seven years and then, after returning in 1411, for Caspe and finally Valencia. A number of possibilities present themselves. His connection with the Aragonese court may have been affected by adverse developments there, possibly related to his position as astrologer. Presumably, he and his abilities had been viewed with favor by Joan I when he was appointed familiar of the court in 1392. Precisely because this position was that of astrologer-physician, however, Duran’s place may have been jeopardized after Joan died in 1396. Joan’s brother and successor Martí I had a far less enthusiastic attitude toward astrology; in 1398/9, the court poet Bernat Metge (1346–1413) wrote Lo Somni, an attack on Joan and his astrological and magical interests.78 Still, Martí did not make an aggressive attempt to purge the court of astrologers and their books, and, as far as we know, Duran remained in Perpignan, in one capacity or another, until his first prolonged absence starting in 1404.
In any case, astrology may not have been the real issue at all. In 1413, after the two-year interregnum, the new Aragonese king Fernando I began his rule, and his attitude toward Jews and conversos did not bode well for those among the latter who harbored lingering Jewish sympathies. Perhaps, then, his election was one of the factors driving the newly returned Duran away from the royal seat.79 Fernando supported both Vicent Ferrer and Jerónimo de Santa Fé; the latter was both the king’s physician and, as noted, the guiding force in the Tortosa disputation (January 1413–December 1414): an event that followed quickly on the Compromise of Caspe. The atmosphere in courtly circles may have become perilous.
As for the destination of Valencia, if that identification is correct, Duran’s move there is somewhat puzzling. One might have expected an attempt to flee to Italy, where he might return to practicing Judaism openly now that his life in Perpignan was ending. Evidently, however, his purpose in leaving Perpignan was not to live openly as a Jew. He appears in the Valencia archives as Honoratus, and thus presumably was still living outwardly as a Christian in his new city. Could the choice of Valencia be connected to a decision to remain living the life of a converso? Valencia had a relatively vigorous converso community that, despite inquisitorial activity, seems to have survived and was aided in its Judaizing, as Mark Meyerson has documented, by the neighboring Jewish community of Morvedre, the largest in the kingdom of Valencia.80 If one were to seek out a community in which it might be possible to live as an actively Judaizing converso, among a large group of other converts from 1391, Valencia could have been the place.
And yet his decision to leave Perpignan and to end his life in Valencia may have been less complicated than I have portrayed it. When Duran traveled earlier to Tudela and Pamplona, or for that matter to Caspe, he seems to have been pursuing opportunities related to his medical profession. So here, too, once again, professional and pragmatic interests could have been at the back of his movements.
HOW DID HE DO IT?
Scholars have repeatedly wondered how, as a New Christian, Honoratus de Bonafide could have written works in Hebrew, let alone anti-Christian polemics, without retaliation by the Inquisition. While there is no way to know for certain, it is possible to speculate about the circumstances that may have made this possible.
One consideration is that intense danger to Judaizers from inquisitors had not yet fully crystallized. The official Spanish Inquisition, notoriously active against backsliding conversos in Seville, did not begin to function in Castile until 1481. In Catalonia, it was established only in 1483 and in the Crown of Aragon a year later. What was active earlier in Aragon was the Papal Inquisition, which, having begun as an ecclesiastical response to the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Cathar heresies, traditionally dealt with issues other than Judaizing.
This is not to say that it altogether refrained from investigating relapsed conversos. In 1346, a backsliding convert had been burned at the stake by the Roussillon office of the Aragonese Papal Inquisition. That regional office sat in Perpignan, presumably in the Dominican monastery: that is, just across the street from the house that appears to have belonged to Profayt Duran.81 One of the most famous
