Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord
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landscape in which several ethnic, racial, religious, and economic conceptions of conversos’ “otherness” combined in common parlance to articulate the paranoid anxieties of a rather bewildered Spanish public. It was a landscape born of the Portuguese influx and the perceptual challenge that the influx posed, namely, how to understand, define, and identify the new converso danger.
Pereira’s own avowed dislike of wealthy merchants is an example of a widespread type of anxiety concerning the roles that conversos played—and were thought to play—in the economic life of Spain and Portugal. In both countries there were small numbers of conversos who occupied prominent positions in commerce and high finance. This is one reason that a stereotype developed of conversos as powerful and rapacious “businessmen.” The Portuguese term homens de negocios, its Spanish equivalent, hombres de negocios and the bilingual term mercaderes gave linguistic expression to this stereotype. By the early 1600s, those terms, like the more generic hombres de la nation (men of the Nation) had become popular euphemisms for conversos.
Modern scholars have tended to regard New Christians as a predominantly urban merchant bourgeoisie.119 On the whole, this generalization is probably accurate given the high proportion of conversos who were city-bound traffickers and retailers. It would skew the record, however, to ignore the fact that conversos also took part in such occupations as soldiering, farming, cattle raising, domestic service, and manual labor, not to mention medicine, bureaucratic administration, tax collection, and diplomacy—four traditionally “Jewish” occupations that did not involve the buying and selling of material commodities.120 A few conversos even became clerics as late as the seventeenth century, despite repeated inquisitorial purges and the fact that “purity of blood” had become a legal requisite for entering religious orders and for assuming many ecclesiastical posts.121
Within the substratum of New Christian comerciantes122 itself there was substantial diversity. From penurious street vendors, to petty shopkeepers, artisans and seamstresses, to relatively comfortable arrendadores, it is clear that converso businessmen and merchants did not comprise a homogeneous group. In the world of these conversos, the word negocios (“business”—literally, “affairs” or “deals”) actually pointed to a variety of mercantile and sometimes non-mercantile activities. As Pilar Huerga Criado has observed, the purview of a single converso businessman could in fact be very broad: “The field in which converso businessmen developed their negocios extended to all economic sectors: Agricultural, artisanal, mercantile, and financial. One who exploited the land, also trafficked in cattle and wine, sold and bought cloths, and administered some rent.”123 Many a New Christian described himself (less often herself) as a mercader (or comerciante) de todos géneros—literally a “merchant of all genres of merchandise.”124 Somewhat reminiscent of the colloquial English term “jack of all trades,” this designation underscores the versatility that such individuals developed in order to survive within a variegated economic environment. The point is that New Christians did not form a monolithic class of capitalists or an undifferentiated bourgeoisie. Rather, they were a dynamic and well-integrated part of the Iberian economy whose activities in various fields, many if not most of them commercial, reflected the multifarious nature of that economy.
To be sure, in a country as import-dependent as Spain was during the 1600’s, it was only 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