Written by: Pedro Gaião

The year 1492 is a watershed in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. In the previous decades, the marriage of Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon shaped what would become one of the largest and most powerful potentates in Europe and the Mediterranean Sea for the rest of the Modern Age. And although two of the largest states on the Iberian Peninsula were now in political union, Spain’s cultural and religious unification agenda encountered two major obstacles: I) an ancient and well-established cultural and religious diversity; II) Granada, a resilient Muslim state, to the south.

Although 1492 is considered the landmark of the “end of the Reconquista”, where Christians would finally have expelled their Muslim invaders after almost 800 years of occupation, Modern Historiography today recognizes the very concept of Reconquista as anachronistic and equivocal; especially keeping in mind that it was invented in the 19th century, as part of other myths of national formation in nationalist historiography, so typical in this period.

It is clear that the Iberian peninsula, throughout this time, was inhabited and had Muslim States, but the idea of ​​a perpetual dichotomy between Christians and Muslims – especially in view of the whole history of alliances between different Muslim and Christian potentates – is completely mythological and unrealistic. Naturally, there was occasional hostility and militancy between both religions, but they coexisted with periods of tolerance, exchanges and alliances.

By the middle of the 13th century, all the remaining Muslim principalities were either conquered or reduced to a condition of tax vassalage; similarly to the system used by the Ottomans to diverse Balkan States, like the Bulgarian, Byzantine Empires and the principalities of Wallachia and Serbia. Governments, their aristocracies and their laws were maintained in exchange for providing taxes, soldiers and recognizing suzerainty. Naturally, the Christian kingdoms demanded more and more, and little by little the tax vassals were being absorbed within the Christian States. But Granada persisted: due to its maritime exit to the Mediterranean, the Emirate of Granada maintained a precious link with the Muslim States of Africa; its defensive preparation, its immense economic capacity and its competent military organization managed to keep it standing while other emirates fell one after another. It was only with a massive investment from the new kingdom of Spain, allied with a dedicated offensive organization and the emirate’s own internal division that allowed not the complete conquest, but the surrender of Granada. Among the terms of this surrender, it was established that Muslim and Jewish populations should have their former religious rights respected and protected; which the Catholic Kings quickly agreed, giving their words, and after six months breaking their agreements.

Muslims and Jews were given a simple choice: convert or go away. But with some details: they could not take money, goods and even their young children could not go with them, since they would be raised by priests of the Church and indoctrinated in the Catholic faith. For these and other varied reasons (the majority of the population of the former emirate was of peasants, not being able to afford the travel costs), as the danger of the journey itself, many chose to stay; but, as predictable as one might imagine, not everyone was genuinely converted to Catholicism, preferring a public and nominal conversion while keeping their religious practices a secret.

In these new communities, those who came from a Muslim background, or “Moor”, were known as moriscos. Despite the new religion, they maintained cuisine, fashion, language, knowledge and customs in the way of their “pagan” past, thus distinguishing themselves from the so-called Old Christians, those who could be called “more typical Spaniards” and who descended from the conquerors of the Moors.

Originally, the Spanish Inquisition acted only against those who practiced their non-Christian religion in secret, be it Judaism or Islam. But the cultural hegemony agenda promoted by the Crown, in addition to the very fact that there would only be heterodoxy among communities that refused to be acculturated, eventually brought religious persecution to the condition of cultural and ethnic persecution; with even some historians, like Toby Green, claiming that the Iberian Peninsula can be credited with the first collective experience of modern racism in Europe.

In this context, not only their habits, language or dress put them in a discriminatory condition, but even their hygiene and science. The well-known historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Henry Kamen, also attributes this responsibility to the Catholic Church in Spain:

It was undoubtedly the Inquisition that, from 1480 onwards, gave the greatest impetus to the spread of discrimination […] It seemed that the true religion was protected by excluding converts from all important positions [1]

But even though prejudice was an imperative in general relations, an unpleasant fact for the Old Christians was that the medicine of the New Christians was far superior to that generally practiced by the former. Since the Middle Ages, Iberian kings have chosen their doctors among the Jewish and Islamic population of their kingdoms; in this new scenario, things would not change now.

Due to the segregationist laws – not to say racist – of Unified Spain, the Pure Blood Statute prohibited not only the participation of new Christians in public positions, but even enrollment in Universities, in Catholic monastic orders or in the clergy itself. Such was the obsession with “blood purity” that even Catholic institutions outside Spain, because of the presence of many Spaniards, adhered to the segregation promoted by the clergy and the Crown: the College of St. Clement of Bologna, Italy, which was part of the oldest Western University in the world, prohibited converts to study [2].

As early as 1506, the College of Surgeons in Barcelona adopted statutes of cleanliness. The 15th-century statutes of Valencia apothecaries not only banned those ‘of Jewish descent’ from apothecary training, but in 1529 extended the ban to affect any old Christian married to a woman of Jewish descent. The statutes of the Valencian college stipulated that any individual of Jewish ancestry who defrauded his entrance exam would be fined 500 ducats of gold and sentenced to perpetual exile from the city. Similar racial statutes were adopted or confirmed by the Spanish Crown to the schools of apothecaries in the cities of Barcelona, Zaragoza and Seville during the 16th century.

[…]

At the end of the 16th century, the Catalan friar Juan Benito de Guardiola praised the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona for its strict adherence to the Estatuto de Limpieza and for the rejection of judeoconversos as an example to be imitated by the other medical schools of the Iberian Peninsula. [3]

Thus, descendants of Jews and Muslims, simply because they have a “contaminated” ancestry, were banned from studying in the Medicine University, thus restricting the conservation of their own ethnic knowledge on the subject. Portugal was also not unknown to intolerant and racist legislation:

In Portugal, real action was not limited to passive confirmation of racial statutes, […] but actively sought to assist and implement racial discrimination […]. An edict instituted by the Crown in 1585 instructed all municipalities, charities (mercies) and hospitals to immediately expel any new Christian doctor in the availability of an old Christian practitioner of medicine who was willing to be employed by them. This racial preference was expanded in 1599 to include doctors employed by the supreme legal court (Casa da Suplicação) and the court of legal appeals (Casa do Cível). In addition, on March 30, 1581, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) instituted the Bull Multos adhuc ex Christianis, once again reiterating the ban on the Decretum Gratiani to Christians seeking medical treatment with Jews. Although not specifically aimed at Judeoconversos, but rather at Jews in general, the papal decree was used as ammunition by anti-Semitic propaganda in the Iberian Peninsula. [3]

In this sense, due to the anti-Semitic nature of Spanish Catholicism, Moorish physicians ended up suffering less persecution than descendants of Jews. Especially because of religious legends against Jewish physicians:

The Inquisition seems to have taken a leading role in stimulating an increase in fears about Jewish medical murder. It is worth remembering that Bishop André of Noronha received his handwritten copy of forged letters that implied that Jew-converts participated in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy (of which the medical conspiracy was only one element) from an inquisitor. Many inquisitors themselves appear to have given credence to the allegations of a medical conspiracy. Particularly decisive in this respect is the letter sent in 1619 by an inquisitor to the court in Coimbra for the General Council of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon. The inquisitor informed the Council that his court arrested a number of Judeo-conversational doctors and focuses his attention on an old case of religiously motivated murders perpetrated by a Judeoconverso doctor, although, typically, he does not name the man or offer specific details of the case:

“A doctor [Judeoconverso] confessed to the Holy Office (after confessing his Judaism) that he killed old Christians using purgatives and other drugs that did not cure the illnesses they suffered. If he treated some with the appropriate remedies, it was to preserve his reputation. [He acted like this so that], if he had killed all his patients, no one would want to be treated by him, and so he wouldn’t be able to earn a living through his profession.”

Perhaps inevitably, public hysteria about medical murder was fueled by incendiary manuscripts and pamphlets listing the names and places of residence of physicians accused of killing their patients. For example, the Portuguese pamphlet ‘”Treaty in which it is proved that the new Christians of the [Hebrew] Nation who reside in Portugal are secretly Jews and that the evils they are doing on old Christians are shown”, circulating in the 1630s, they list the names of 51 New Christian phyisicians, surgeons and apothecaries working in Portugal and Spain, condemned by the Inquisition of crypto-Jewish beliefs and, in some cases, even mass murder. The most visible of those listed was Garcia Lopes de Potalegre, who was accused of poisoning no less than 150 young Christian patients, including 25 nobles (members of the low nobility); as well as a certain Pero Lopes de Goa, who supposedly killed 70 old Christian patients; there was still the apothecary Gabriel Pinto, a resident of Coimbra burned at the stake in 1600, for having “confessed to killing many old Christians, including nuns and clergy”. The fact that the list contains names of numerous individuals who were genuinely prosecuted by the Inquisition is interesting, because it indicates that the anonymous author wanted to make his allegations seem real. Despite this, the recent research by José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, who examined the surviving inquisitorial records in the Portuguese National Archives of these accused doctors found no trace of such charges in these trials. [3]

The forged documents on the global Jewish conspiracy mentioned, among which the Charter of the Jews of Constantinople stands out, was prepared by the archbishop of Toledo, Juan Martinez Siliceo in the middle of the 16th century [4]. It is interesting to note, after all, that the Catholic forger emphasized that Jews would be welcomed in Constantinople [5], making an analogy to the very assistance that the Ottoman sultan gave to marginalized communities in the 1492 Expulsion decrees and creating a sense of consistency in the false narrative.

The situation of Muslim physicians was slightly more different from that of the other minority. Even so, “the cleaning statutes alienated them from the admission of many university schools, as well as from the schools of surgeons and apothecaries” [6].

Compared to the Judeoconversos, medical practitioners from the Moorish minority escaped virtually unscathed from suspicions that they were orchestrating a secret medical assassination campaign. […] Luis Garcia Ballester’s research has shown that Moorish practitioners of medicine tend to practice their techniques not only in their own communities, but also among a wide variety of new Christian patients as unlicensed ‘healers’ (known as sanadores). Even Philip II turned to Moorish doctors to provide help against his children’s illnesses [6]

The situation is quite peculiar: alienated from university education and defamed as “healers” by the population of the old Catholics, Moorish people still had a lot of demand among the same who used to depreciate them. As a Catholic source of the time admits:

These Moors prescribe medicine to patients who have already been abandoned by Christian doctors. [7]

It is quite obvious that the Moors were of higher quality than the university-trained old Christians, despite all the alienating legislation against them. But as Renton and Gidley claim:

Anti-Islamic sentiment did not spare moorish medical practitioners. Many of them did not receive university training and were part of what Luis Garcia Ballester described as ‘medical subculture’. Working as unlicensed ‘healers’, the Moors were often the target of suspicion and their medical techniques were the target of accusations of demonic witchcraft and diabolical connections. Still, such accusations of demonic witchcraft were made on the basis of the Moorish medical knowledge (and occasionally their apparent unexplained success), rather than translating into accusations of medical plots against old Christian patients. This was the case with Jerônimo Pachet, who was called by none other than King Philip II of Spain, to cure the diseases of his children who were terribly ill, and was also prosecuted by the Inquisition twice, in 1567 and in 1580. [8]

The Spanish Christian population was into a conspiracy bordering to schizophrenia: if a New Christian physician caused deaths, he was part of an anti-Catholic conspiracy, but if he was successful, then he must have some kind of help from the Devil himself. But as hypocritical as it may be, the Iberian conspiracy zeal did not prevent them from making use of the physicians they used to condemn. As the historian Gaspar Escolano says, in a work published in 1610:

The medical Moors who walk among us, favored by the means known to them, overcome us through the (plants), with whom they do incredible cures, as we saw in the case of a certain Pachete, who proved to be familiar and who served to the herbalist devil, having [for this reason] been penitentiated by the Holy Office. [9]

But despite being rare, there were accusations of conspiracies carried out by Moorish doctors, although, of course, they are all fueled by prejudice, hysteria and religious fanaticism:

A rare reference to an alleged plot of Moorish doctors can be found in the meeting of the Parliament of Castile, in September 1607, when the parliamentarian Pedro de Vesga demanded that the Moors were to be prohibited from studying in medical colleges and even from participating in public classes of medicine. His fierce rhetoric matched his extremist views, and he proceeds to ask, why, if Moorish men are not allowed to carry weapons (because of the fear that they might rebel and help the Ottomans or Berbers on the Spanish Coast), they too they were not banned from medical practice, since ‘the ability to heal is the greatest weapon’. Vesga claimed that the Moors were using medical knowledge to ‘kill more in this kingdom than the Turks and the British’ and secretly caused abortions in old Christian women. Furthermore, he argued that there was a Moorish doctor in Madrid called ‘the Avenger’ who apparently murdered 300 of his patients with a ‘poisonous ointment’, while another Moorish man used his techniques to maim patients so that they would not be able to use weapons. [10]

Naturally: “Pedro de Vesga’s allegations were clearly inspired by conspiracyist beliefs about a medical plot of Judeoconversos physicians. The reference to a phyisician known as ‘the Avenger’ is a manifest and direct (even clumsy) retraining of the myth of the murderous judeuconverso doctor-avenging assassin who appears in Diego de Simancas’s work. Vesga’s argument is nothing more than a crude attempt to usurp the anti-Semitic legend of the Jewish medical killer and apply it to serve and justify anti-Moorish prejudice”. [10]

It can be difficult to determine whether voices such as Pedro de Vesga’s were decisive in the Moorish expulsion decree in 1609, just 2 years after his speech at the Courts of Castile. What is evident, however, is the hypocrisy in the need and discrimination of these doctors:

 With regard to the high class of society, it can be said that their services were requested when there was no other choice, that is, when the physician [old Christian] delivered the patient to the “manos de Dios”. [11]

And still:

The Moorish healers themselves are aware of this situation. One of them, Jerônimo Pachet, after his success in curing Philip III, son of Philip II and heir to the crown, was pressured by the inquisitors to be more explicit in his relations with the demon (the ‘familiar’), that the judges were endeavored to make it the only explanation for their correct diagnoses and spectacular cures. The summary contained in the process says: ‘it was said that this (Moor) has already confessed and counted the goods and everything that the familiar (the devil) did for him, giving him a lot of money, teaching and authorizing to heal those whom the other experienced physicians abandoned… and since 35 years until now, everyone has been cured and hasn’t even died, except for those with deadly illness and who refused to take the medicines. [12]

Although there is little value in a confession given under threat or torture, the testimony cited by Pachet, whether true or not, at least has a theological basis in Islam, that is: the belief in djinns – spirits created by God – capable of causing harm or to do good, that could be expelled from a sick victim or assist in the healing of the patient. But if this is really the case, especially considering the popular Catholic belief in Moorish witchcraft, why did they undergo treatment with the same sorcerers they abhorred?

However, despite these impediments, this Moorish sector, as is the case with medicine, continued to enjoy a prestige and popularity that caused envy and persecution. [13]

This curious aspect, and at the same time hypocritical, is a typical badge of Spanish society in the modern age.

“José Maria martin Ruiz stated that Philip II could never put his son’s life in the hands of a doctor like Jerônimo Pachet: ‘No quiero la salud por tan malos Médicos’”, said the king. [14]

We all know the outcome, the king known for his Catholic militancy, for the persecution of Protestants, crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims, had to change his views. Pachet, however, had a more tragic end in the hands of the powerful:

“Jerônimo Pachet was put in prison and died in the cells of the Inquisition, victim of torment that he had suffered and was unable to bear in 1580”. [15]

REFERENCES

[1] KAMEN, Henry. La inquisición Española. Uma revisión histórica, p. 225-226.

[2] ibid.

[3] RENTON, James. GIDLEY, Ben. Antissemitism and Islamophobia: a zhared history? Springer, 2017.

[4] KAMEN, ibid, p. 231.

[5] CHILLIDA, Gonzalo Álvarez. El Antissemitismo en España: La imagem del judio. Madri: Marcial Pons, 2002. p. 46.

[6] RENTON. GIDLEY. Ibid.

[7] BLEDA, J. Defensio Fidei, p. 368.

[8] RENTON. GIDLEY. Ibid.

[9] ESCOLANO, Gaspar. Decada primera de la insigne y coronada Ciudad y Reyno de Valencia, apud MEY, Pedro Patricio. Valencia, 1610-1611. Livro V, col. 1042.

[10] RENTON. GIDLEY. Ibid.

[11] BLEDA, J. apud LOS ANTECEDENTES DE LA PROFESIÓN NATUROPÁTICA EM ESPAÑA: Sanadores Moriscos. Acesso em 19 de dezembro de 2020.

[12] ARQUIVO HISTÓRICO NACIONAL DE MADRI. Inquisicion de Valencia, leg. 840.

[13] GUILLEM, G. Gironés. El morisco que salvo al rey, p. 2. Disponível em: https://www.academia.edu/19581122/El_morisco_que_salv%C3%B3_al_rey?fbclid=IwAR34tkias8rIN8JVSIsLXF8Oj95rCRz5ekQSCG91hn4wRH2knEDW2IsLpSA. Visited in december 20 of 2020.

[14] Ibid, p. 3

[15] Ibid, p. 5.