Basque History of the World

Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky Page A

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Authors: Mark Kurlansky
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for the excommunication of “Basques and Navarrese, who practice such cruelties to Christians, laying waste like infidels, sparing neither elderly, orphans, widows, or children.” In that epoch, a comparison to infidels was the harshest condemnation.
    The Basques ever since have been chained to an enduring image as brutal, unfriendly, mercenary, and untrustworthy. The habit of distinguishing between “Christians” and Basques also endured.
    W HEN A PEOPLE of strange practices and bad reputation collides with an age of intolerance, disaster seems inevitable. The time of the Protestant Reformation, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was such a period.
    The Inquisition had been created in medieval Aragón to guard the purity of the Church. Less than twenty years before the final defeat of the Muslims, it was reorganized and brought to Castile. After the victory of the Reconquista, Isabella extended its authority to the Spanish Empire from Sicily through Latin America. Other countries also had inquisitions, papal courts of inquiry. But the Spanish Inquisition was different because it was not controlled by Rome. The inquisitor general was appointed by the king of Spain, confirmed by the pope, and left to act however he saw fit. He had his own secret police, his own ministry, La Suprema , and his own prisons, ominously known as las cárceles secretas , secret prison cells.
    All Inquisition officials and employees were sworn to secrecy, and all witnesses and accused were ordered to remain silent. The archives were closed. Not even the king could make inquiries about Inquisition proceedings except for financial matters, since the crown was owed a share of confiscated property. The accused, held incommunicado, vanished from sight for years with no explanation. Agents of the Inquisition were unpaid, but the coveted positions offered prestige, power, and privilege, including complete immunity from secular authority.
    The Inquisition began hunting for hidden Jews following a 1391 order to convert to Christianity. In 1492, Jews were given four months to leave lands that had been family homes for almost a millennium in some cases. “We order them by the end of July to leave all the kingdoms and fiefdoms and never return,” said the decree. After the mass expulsion, the primary preoccupation of the Inquisition was uncovering clandestine Jews and Muslims. The Muslims, hidden Moors, were called Convertis, Moriscos, or Moriscotes. The hidden Jews were called Tornidoros or Marranos—pigs.
    Some 300,000 people were expelled from Castile and Aragón. If they lived in western Castile, they fled to Portugal; from the south they went to Morocco; and from Aragón to Basque country. Basques on both sides of the border, being by then exemplary Catholics, cooperated, often with enthusiasm, in the hunt for Moriscos and Marranos.
    Unlike Spain, France allowed Jews, though their activities and living areas were severely restricted. But Convertis and Marranos, hidden Muslims and Jews from Spain, were illegal. Nevertheless, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a considerable population of Marranos from Portugal settled in French Basqueland, and the persistent accusation was that they engaged in contraband with Spain. In the late sixteenth century, French authorities were expressing great alarm over this discovery, even though smuggling had long been the stock-in-trade of the Basques without ever alarming anyone.
    A Portuguese named Farcian Vaez was arrested in Labourd for Judaism, and it was reported that two bags of counterfeit money were found on him. According to his confession, probably forced, not only was he Jewish, but “all the Portuguese who pass through St-Jean-de-Luz practice Judaism and buy merchandise to sell in Spain.” He said the merchandise was purchased with counterfeit money made in Flanders.
    In St.-Jean-de-Luz, the local clergy even suspected other priests, such as the Portuguese Father Antonio Leguel. Leguel was

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