1 Silíceo’s Education and Early Career

Silíceo was born to poor laborers in a village in Extremadura in 1486. In 1507, he went to Paris and obtained the education that enabled his own relatively successful scholarly career. He returned to Spain after nine years abroad, right around the time Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor. By the following summer of 1517, Silíceo was installed at Salamanca’s college, a center of limpieza ideology.⁸ He was then ordained and went on to hold various jobs across the Castile upon which Charles had left his famously bad first impression.⁹ In 1520, Charles left this Castile to Adrian of Utrecht, prompting the famous rebellion of the comuneros (1520–1521), which successfully held Toledo for some months.¹⁰

The memory of 1521 would loom over Silíceo’s efforts. Silíceo mentioned the comuneros in the same breadth he described his enemies’ relatives as being of Jewish casta.¹¹ While some Toledans certainly were descendants of comuneros, it’s hard to say how many of them were conversos.¹² Yet when Silíceo looked back on that turbulent third decade of the sixteenth century, he saw descendants of Jews in many highly unlikely places. Recall that 1521 was also the year of Martin Luther’s excommunication. Germany’s heretical princes were ascribed Jewish ancestry in Silíceo’s list of reasons, as were the Alumbrados, a heretical movement whose name literally meant “The Enlightened Ones.”¹³ He would cast the emergent Jesuits in similar terms.¹⁴

In 1530, when Silíceo was in his forties, the chaplains of the Capilla de los Reyes Nuevos asked for royal approval of their own statue.¹⁵ These chaplains, who were appointed by the king, demanded “that none should be admitted as a colleague without presenting proof and testimony of limpieza; that if they were to be of the generation of Moors or Jews or to have some raza of those, they could be dismissed.”¹⁶ In these lines, “cleanliness” or “purity” (limpieza) is connected to “race” (raza) but they are not synonyms. The English word race, as used in this paper, refers to a set of interlocking ideas including lineage, cleanliness, and raza itself. For Silíceo and the Capilla statute authors, raza was something possessed by those lacking limpieza. Race lay within the not-clean part of the blood ratio, rendering only the one in possession of limpieza a clean human. Those who failed their limpieza exam had some raza where only cleanliness should have been. In his fifteenth century work Corbacho, the author Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, also known as the Archpriest of Talavera, had spoken of raza as good or bad.¹⁷ According to Silíceo’s younger contemporary, Sebastián de Covarrubias (1539–1613), “race in human lineages is meant badly, as in having some race of Moor or Jew.”¹⁸ Silíceo’s own derogatory racial vocabulary would resemble that of this Capilla statute and so many others.

In 1534, while Charles captured Tunisia from the Ottomans, Isabel sought a teacher for the young prince. Her search was aided by, among others, Archbishop Juan Tavera of Toledo and the influential Francisco de los Cobos (Charles V’s favorite and effective ruler of Spain). Under their influence, Isabel hired Silíceo. Ángel Santos Vaqueros provides a description of the prince’s education, sent by Silíceo to the king: “At this age of fourteen, when nature begins to regret weakness, God gave the prince much will for hunting, which, with study, occupies most of his time …”¹⁹ Charles was less inclined to celebrate the hunt. He increasingly entrusted Phillip’s education to Juan de Zúñiga.²⁰

Yet Silíceo remained close to Phillip. When Phillip married Portuguese Princess María Manuela, it was Silíceo who was selected to fetch the bride from Portugal before settling in as bishop of Cartagena in 1541. In 1543, the same year he became regent, Phillip named Silíceo his personal confessor. In a letter of broader political instruction, Charles gave Phillip advice about Silíceo:

As for the Bishop of Cartagena, you know him, and we all know him to be a very good man. Certainly, he has not been, and is not, the one who best suits you for your studies. He’s wanted too much to make you happy. God willing this hasn’t been in some particular respects. He is your main chaplain. You make confession with him. It would not be good if in things of the conscience he should want so much to make you happy as he has in study. Up until this point, there hasn’t been a problem. From now on, there could be, and a very big one. Consider what goes into this, for it’s nothing other than the soul.²¹

For Charles, Silíceo may be a valued chaplain for Phillip, but he’s not a suitable official confessor. With a telling recognition of his son’s dependency on Silíceo, Charles preemptively permits Phillip to let Silíceo see the letter. He’s certain the good bishop will agree with whatever Phillip wants, as he does with everything else presented to him.

If, as Charles clearly believed, the prince’s choice of Silíceo as confessor was a sign of support for his old teacher, that support would have been useful to Silíceo as bishop of Cartagena. The city remained a site of limpieza tension. A few months prior to Silíceo’s 1541 arrival, the confeso Juan de Santesteva had died under controversial circumstances. Silíceo passed some years engrossed in Cartagena’s affairs. In 1543, he was named confessor to Phillip, the same year he became regent of Spain.²² On January 25, 1544, the Cartagena cathedral proposed the reinstitution of their past limpieza statute, reopening a debate centered on the memory of Santesteva. Two days later, the Inquisition posthumously condemned Santesteva, exhumed his remains and burned them. That April, Silíceo reinstated Cartagena’s statute.²³

Archbishop Tavera of Toledo died in August of 1545, and Silíceo had his job by December. His lucky 1545 was not reflective of Spain’s larger fate, however. Maria Manuela died after producing a famously unhealthy heir.²⁴ Charles’s taxes exacerbated an economic crisis. In May, Phillip wrote to his father about Spain’s poverty, as he and Los Cobos had done for years: “The common people, who have to pay these [taxes], are reduced to such utter misery that many of them walk naked.”²⁵

2 Silíceo’s Statute: 1546–1548

Silíceo did not arrive in Toledo until Christmas Eve of 1546.²⁶ His transition was shaped by several controversies already at play in the cathedral chapter. Specialists once believed that Los Cobos, Charles’s old favorite, was among those who opposed Silíceo’s coming to Toledo. More likely, Los Cobos actually canvassed for Silíceo, hoping a grateful new archbishop would grant him one of the few things in Spain he wanted but did not have: the adelantamiento of Cazorla.²⁷ Navigating a succession dispute, Los Cobos had pursued this Andalusian hill (once held by the Mendozas, his in-laws) since 1535, at which point he wrested it away from the archdiocese, aided by Charles himself, gaining papal approval that was confirmed by Toledo’s cathedral in those months after Tavera’s death and before Silíceo’s arrival. After Silíceo got to Toledo, the cathedral chapter appealed that decision to give Cazorla to Los Cobos. Undercutting Los Cobos, Silíceo gave Cazorla to Ruy Gómez de Silva, one of Phillip’s most intimate servants. Around March, Charles would ask Silíceo to confirm this decision, which so alienated his old favorite. Silíceo returned a “refusal to respond,” but cited finances and Los Cobos’s “illegal approaches to members of the council for their support.”²⁸

Tensions over Cazorla persisted, but more relevant controversy stemmed from a decision made in September of 1546, during those months before Silíceo’s arrival. Pope Paul III had given Hernán Ximénez, son of a converso accused of apostasy by the Inquisition, a benefice in Toledo’s cathedral. In the early months of 1547, Silíceo protested this appointment with various letters, including one to Pope Paul III. In his message, Silíceo compared the admission of men of unknown race (described with the Latin word genus) to the admission of horses of unknown breed into one’s stable. No stable owner would allow it, Silíceo insists, even if the horse were given for free. To admit men without demonstrated good genus would be to hold the church to standards lower than this hypothetical stable, a repugnant outcome that Silíceo tries to depict as the inevitable consequence of not accepting his own statute.²⁹

Jiménez’s case continued to be a contested issue among the cathedral’s men.³⁰ Yet these power struggles couldn’t have been a top priority for Charles in the spring of 1547. In April, he won his famous victory at Mühlberg, and in May, his trusted Los Cobos died. By June, the cathedral men were still debating the Jiménez case. On July 19, they voted to exclude him. Moments after this decision, Silíceo presented his first statute. The second appeared on July 23, and the third appeared on July 29.³¹ What follows is a rough sketch of the ensuing controversy.³²

On July 23, after verbal protests from the opposition, the cathedral’s men passed Silíceo’s second statute draft and decided to send it to Rome for approval, as expected. That same day, a group of city authorities (jurados) denounced the statute, while the city council (ayuntamiento) expressed support. On July 27, Silíceo and his supporters prepared to send the appropriate correspondances to pope, king and royal councils. Something inflammatory must have occurred, however, for on July 29, the cathedral reapproved a much longer, more controversial statute. They decided to send Diego de Guzmán as messenger. He was to seek royal approval for the statute, then ask permission to proceed to Italy for papal approval.

The channels of information between cathedral and city were wide open. The anti-statute jurados immediately wrote to Phillip. On August 3, the ayuntamiento wrote to Phillip, too. The jurados wrote to him again on August 7. The ayuntamiento followed suit on August 10. During these same chaotic days, the cathedral opposition received the anti-statute requerimiento of the Archdeacons of Guadalajara and Talavera (also the brothers Mendoza). This may have been the moment when they got the anti-statute letter from University of Alcalá, too.³³ On August 12, Silíceo wrote to Phillip again, referencing the support he enjoyed from the ayuntamiento. Diego de Guzmán got to Phillip on August 16 to plead Silíceo’s case. On August 24, Phillip declined to immediately support his old teacher’s obsessions, kicking the decision to the Royal Council, instead.

On September 2, García Manrique slapped Bernadino Zapata for failing to speak to Silíceo with the proper respect.³⁴ Bernadino’s brother, Luis Zapata, entered the cathedral with several men, swords drawn. The family Zapata, widely regarded as the descendants of conversos, made up much of the opposition votes. Luis’ men attacked García and other canons who were trying to leave the church, forcing them back towards the main altar. Various city officials, including jurados, intervened. Garcia and Bernadino were arrested, and Luis was imprisoned in a tower. Once again, various people wrote to Phillip, who on September 13 and 15 mandated that no one in the church should use or discuss the statute. Back and forth the various parties went, struggling over the statute, the meaning of September 2, and whether to obey Phillip. The prince reiterated his position in November.

The record falls relatively quiet until February 1548, at which point Charles V wrote several letters, none of which confirmed the statute. The pro-statute camp at Toledo decided to urge Diego de Guzmán to abandon hope of royal approval and seek papal approval, instead. Not much is known about Guzmán’s activities in Rome, but relations between the Hapsburgs and the pope were strained at this time. In May 1548, Phillip asked Toledo’s two factions to present their arguments before the Royal Council. Accustomed to ignoring the prince, they waited to hear what the pope had to say. On June 28, Diego de Guzman read the papal approval for the statute to the cathedral. On the last day of June 1548, nearly a year after the statute was first proposed, the cathedral council finally met to decide who would present their interests to the Royal Council. Most of our extant documents come from the dossier sent to the Royal Council in July 1548.³⁵ Still, Phillip refused to decide. Disregarding his old student, Silíceo was running limpieza checks again by August 17. On September 4, Phillip sent the cathedral a reminder to wait for official word.

On October 19, Charles suddenly approved the statute, bringing his son in line. Charles’s sudden approval is more difficult to explain than Phillip’s youthful inexperience, especially given that emperor and archbishop continued to clash over Cazorla. Hernández Franco shows that Silíceo likely benefitted from the help of Antonio Perrenot de Granvela, an old connection from Paris who had risen to become a great favorite of Charles.³⁶ The statute was still controversial, but it now had papal and royal approval. From drafting through approval, Toledo’s limpieza struggle was inseparable from local and imperial politics. Some, like the attempts to please Charles, could be easily guessed at. Others, like the clash over Cazorla, are difficult to recover. They are important because they formed the subtext of Silíceo’s attacks, which drew their power from these personal attacks and an ideology of Old Christian racial supremacy.

3 History and Race Frame the Statute

Silíceo’s racial ideology is not limited to the use of the word raza. As seen in the Capilla’s now-familiar demand that none admitted to their cathedral have the raza of Jews or Muslims, the term was just one racial buzzword of a few. In his statute’s first draft, Silíceo could also articulate his ideal vision for society with the word lineage, too. He named as desireable colleagues men of clean lineage and clean life immediately before mandating that a large array of different cathedral positions could no longer be filled by those coming from a lineage “of Jews, Muslims, or heretics.”³⁷

In the second version of the statute, reworked by a few days’ disagreements, the men worthy of joining Toledo’s cathedral are described in the positive. In addition to being Old Christian, they must be either noble or highly educated, a development that closely resembles the vote cast by opposition leader Diego de Castilla.³⁸ In the third version, Silíceo keeps the language of nobility and education, even as he reiterates the significance of the manifest quality of Old Christianness, itself:

and that none of the aforementioned should be descended of the lineage of Jews, Muslims or heretics, and that without this quality of Old Christianness, none of these will be received nor admitted. And if in some case one were received and admitted, and afterwards it became known, through certain and true information, that in him the stated quality of Old Christianness was not present, he would be expelled from our sacred church.³⁹

This sentence concludes by reiterating that these people should not be given salaries or rents. Old Christanness was thus the lack of Jewish, Muslim, or heretical descent, and something one possessed in the positive. It could not be replaced by education or murky categories of nobility. Silíceo often named both Jewish and Muslim ancestors as unacceptable, but his examples were almost exclusively anti-Jewish.⁴⁰

The documents speak of this racial vision, but they speak more of money. The word benefices appears at least twenty times in the Castilian texts, alone. This financial focus was common. In fifteenth-century Barcelona, some forty percent of cases at the bishop’s court dealt with benefices.⁴¹ While such concerns seem baldly materialistic to us, Silíceo gives Charles high-minded explanations for his statute, as when he says that it is “through the consideration of past events that, according to good philosophy, an argument for those events to come can be made.”⁴² This remark introduces Silíceo’s discussion of Toledo’s conquest by the Muslims (I maintain the ideologically-loaded moros):

For, as is read in the histories of Spain, when Toledo was conquered by the moros at the time of the general destruction of Spain, this city of Toledo was sold out by its Jewish residents one Palm Sunday, when the Old Christians had gone out in processions to the church of Santa Leocadia, which is outside the walls of this city. These Old Christians were beheaded by the moros, solely due to the ambushes and treachery of the said Jews, and the city was lost. Due to its nature, its natural strength and fortitude, it could not have been gained without treachery.⁴³

Silíceo is aware that it is controversial to try and use history to predict the future, as seen by his attempt to preempt that critique with a defensive appeal to philosophy. Like most of Silíceo’s evidence, this idea had many antecedents in peninsular thought. Silíceo calls on the concepts of history and philosophy to argue for the corruption of those born from the lineage of Jews, taking for granted the undesirability of Muslim arrival in Spain. He takes Palm Sunday as a temporal site of Christian-Jewish difference. On this holy day, Silíceo’s Jews find an outlet for an apparently preexisting desire to betray their neighbors. The Islamic invasion is their fault. Toledo is eternally and essentially strong, so Islamic chaos could not have penetrated its walls without this Jewish chink in its armor. While modern scholars are careful to distinguish between real Jews and confesos or conversos (Spanish words for “convert” which will be parsed below), Silíceo uses what he understands as real past Jewish actions to explain the fates of those descended from the lineage of Jews, thus collapsing historical distance between the descendants of converts and their ancestors. Such stories gain power when we remember that Silíceo has prepared his listeners to think about Toledo’s history in his introduction:

It is a well-known and famous thing that our Sacred Church of Toledo is the most illustrious, the wealthiest, the most powerful and has the most ministers of any of the churches in the kingdoms of Spain, and except for St. Peter’s in Rome, there is no greater church is found in all Christendom than this one.⁴⁴

The first two versions of the statute pause here. The third continues:

For the most holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Our Lady, came to this church accompanied by many choirs of angels and garbed the blessed Saint Ildefonsus in a chasuble that today is kept as a great relic in the city of Oviedo along with many other relics that are in that Sacred Church. For this reason, it has, as it does, primacy in all of Spain. Thus, Don Juan Martínez Silíceo, Archbishop of Toledo by divine mercy, primate cardinal of the Spains, high chancellor of Castille, advises us to form and appear in Council.⁴⁵

This miracle story, which relates that the Virgin presented St. Idelfonsus with a chasuble, is one of many old tales deployed by Silíceo. Oviedo, as keeper of this object, bears witness to Toledo’s primacy. More important is the self-consciously didactic position from which Silíceo speaks. He is the authority on what is well known and famous. Read in the context of his ire at the papal appointment of Fernando Jiménez, the Virgin’s visit seems like a challenge. Silíceo’s intended message is clear. The pope may be number one, but Silíceo is a close second. His argument for Toledo’s power is his argument for his own.

4 Silíceo after His Statute: 1548–1557

Though the statute would remain controversial, Silíceo turned to other projects after the royal approval of October 1548. In 1550, he wrote a theological tract, defining nobility thusly:

In view of the fact that we received from our past no coat of arms of worldly nobility, we determined, when we attained the grandeur of the rank of Prelate, to take as our emblems those that our Eternal Father gave to his son, Jesus Christ, of whom all men are sons, which is the name of Jesus, carved into a flint.⁴⁶

When the archbishop depicted Christ’s name appearing on a flint or stone, he referenced the most recent surname he had given himself, Silíceo.⁴⁷ When he named his Colegio de las Doncellas Nobles (School for Noble Ladies) in 1551, it was this vision of Christ-like nobility to which he referred. He dreamt of a school that would enroll girls between six and ten years of age, all from the broader Toledo area (except for six, from his own family).⁴⁸ All were to be Old Christian offspring of legitimate marriages, but they could be poor: the school would pay for their limpieza exams and dowries.⁴⁹ Every year, ten girls of the right season were to be married off in order of age to Old Christian men. Silíceo oversaw his students’ marriages and those of his own nieces, as Ángel Santos Vaqueros explains. If a lady did not want to marry, she could remain in the school. If she wanted to join the church, she forfeited her dowry. This school, recently opened to the public in 2016, was one of several women-centric institutions founded by Silíceo.⁵⁰ In a move resonant with contemporary race, Silíceo emphasized the reproductive possibilities of these Old Christian girls and adjusted for the variable of class. Old Christianness was not money. It was reproduced in childbearing. Manuel Perez García confirms that his thinking amounted to a “redefinition of the noble estate.”⁵¹

Silíceo founded other institutions, including a house for repentant women, but to establish a school, specifically, was to speak a political language. The other institutions wealthy enough to provide dowries for girls had old, prestigious names like “de Haro.”⁵² Also in 1551, the Jesuits founded a college in Alcalá, within Silíceo’s diocese.⁵³ On October 29, after having his nephew inquire against them, Silíceo revoked the Jesuits’ licenses, effectively instating a Jesuit ban. Francisco Villanueva and Miguel Torres presented Silíceo with bulls permitting Jesuits to perform sacerdotal duties. In response, Silíceo screamed that he would “burn them all.”⁵⁴ On November 27, Charles’s Royal Council granted the Jesuits immunity, but this did not deter Silíceo from his anti-Jesuit position. Rome sent Cardinal Giovanni Poggio to mediate.⁵⁵ Without asking the Jesuits, he promised Silíceo they would not admit anyone “that had race.”⁵⁶ By March, he revoked his ban against the Jesuits.

In subsequent years, Silíceo continued to clash with his own cathedral council over costly construction projects. In 1555, his statute was approved by a bull of Pope Paul IV.⁵⁷ He became cardinal in February 1556, and was celebrated in grand fashion.⁵⁸ Sometime that same year, Silíceo sent Pope Paul money.⁵⁹ That August, Phillip, now king, approved the statute, though his own ideology of limpieza would remain unclear.⁶⁰ Despite these signs of increased influence, on November 28, Toledo’s council wrote a memorial of grievances against Cardinal Silíceo.⁶¹ In February 1557, Phillip sent Ruy Gómez de Silva across Spain to collect various church payments. Silíceo, now seventy-one, owed the crown various monies, including a donation he had promised then postponed. However, Gómez de Silva remained embroiled in the Cazorla machinations and was in no position to force the old cardinal’s hand. He was still waiting for the donation when Silíceo died on May 3.⁶²

Silíceo remained controversial in death. Fabrice Quero and Ángel Santos Vaquero have uncovered jokes likely made at Silíceo’s expense in the years after his passing.⁶³ Others have suggested that Silíceo is referenced in Lazarillo de Tormes.⁶⁴ A fictional Silíceo appeared alongside Phillip and Charles in a play written by Damián Salucio del Poyo in 1615.⁶⁵

Silíceo’s direct political influence remains hard to measure; as was often the case for limpieza statutes, it’s difficult to say how well his rules were enforced.⁶⁶ Yet his statute inspired copycat statutes. It was transcribed for later thinkers, many of whom remembered Silíceo for his ideas about history. Baltasar Porreño (d. 1639) would write a defense of Silíceo’s statute at the turn of the seventeenth century.

As François Soyer explains, in 1614, the lawyer Ignacio del Villar Maldonado partially reproduced an infamous anti-Jewish document, Letter from the Jews of Constantinople. He traced it to a clergyman of racial purity, who he believed got the letter from Silíceo. Like Silíceo’s justifications for his statute, this Letter accused confesos of plotting to take over the church. This has led some historians to reach the (possible but not quite substantiated) conclusion that Silíceo wrote the Letter. Soyer notes that Porreño also ascribed the story to Silíceo, concluding that “it would be an oversight to fail to acknowledge the evident link between the mid-sixteenth-century rumors reported by Silíceo and the forged cartas.”⁶⁷ This lead is stronger considering Silíceo’s forgotten role in the circulation of a similar tale: as Fidel Fita explained, a manuscript created for the playwright Sebastián de Horozco (1510–ca. 1580) holds both a copy of the Memory of the Sainted Child of la Guardia and a copy of Silíceo’s reasons, the eleventh of which cites the libel. The Memory, “written by Damian de Vergas in 1544, is included in these pages with the visible intent of reinforcing support for the statute.”⁶⁸

5 Debating the Statute: Histories of French and Spanish Old Christianness

Silíceo’s likely use of popular stories like the Letter and the Memory should be read in conversation with his use of the myth of Mary’s chasuble. The eminence of Toledo, represented by that story, shaped debates over raza and limpieza. All involved agreed that the prestige of the cathedral’s men should match the splendor of the city. For example, St. Idelfonsus appears again in the opposition’s list of reasons to contradict, when they insist that it’s absurd to hire idiotic, lowly men over and above well-educated men, simply because the latter are not Old Christians:

Only three archbishops of Toledo have we read of in the last fifteen hundred years who have been celebrated as saints by the Church: Saint Eugene the Martyr, Saint Idelfonsus the Confessor, and Saint Julian the Distinguished Doctor, whom the writer of the Sentencias [Sarmiento] claimed as such. History says he was of Jewish lineage. Now, we would not consider him worthy of a chaplaincy in our choir.⁶⁹

The opposition deems it ridiculous that their church should exclude men of converso descent from minor roles when it has already had archbishops of conversos descent before. These remarks both reference the quantitative unlikeliness of anyone of this lineage rising in the church and suggest it would be impious to assume that what was good enough for those three saints would not be good enough for a lowly chaplain. They may also be attempts to needle Silíceo by reminding him that his current job was once held by the people he despises. Personal pettiness is a real possibility:

It is not based in reason, either, that the authority somehow now falls to the church of Toledo to look for bad qualities in its ministers – those same ministers that the law required and conserved for many years as canons to have an election not only for the beneficiaries of the church but also for the Archbishop himself, who was usually a person of its congregation, which went on until just a little before our own times.⁷⁰

This little history of canon elections reads as an open attack when read with the struggle against Silíceo’s appointment. These men appealed to the institutional power they would have had in the past as part of their effort to resist proposed increase surveillance in the form of Silíceo’s claimed right to go looking for bad qualities. Silíceo gave a rambling response to this fourth reason:

After Adam, who was wiser and more illustrious than Solomon? And yet he idolized and turned from God, from whom he had received grace and favors. If we look for examples, we find many in the Holy Scriptures. The militant Church is not founded on letters or nobility, but on faith. St. Peter was a rustic of little or no letters, as is written in the fourth chapter of Acts of the Apostles, and of no nobility that can be known through his lineage.⁷¹

In painting the learned Solomon as idolatrous, Silíceo attacks the very ideal of wisdom that the ancient king’s name represented in the Christian tradition. Speaking in the rare voice of a sixteenth-century person who experienced what we now call class mobility, Silíceo claims Peter for the rustics of little or no letters. In so doing, he both takes an anti-intellectual stance and draws a direct line between the Biblical past and the pride he takes in his own birthplace. He cites various quotes from Paul, all of which contradict his opponents.

All this that Saint Paul says is inconsistent with what those who oppose the statute say. Because the main basis for one to be a beneficiary of this holy church is faith, as we said above, and the lack of it is an obstacle to becoming a canon and an impediment to being received into the church. And since the Holy Scripture says a little yeast infects the whole mass, the heresies of the ancestors of these confesos leave them defiled. As such, they’re not worthy to be in the temple and palace that Our Lady sanctified. Furthermore, it’s natural that waters, if they are poisonous and venomous at their source, no matter how much they flow over a large area of land, always carry some part of this poison. Likewise, those who are born of heretical parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are presumed to have some of this heresy and poison.⁷²

It is now clearer why Silíceo has insisted on the term confeso over converso. Like history, his reasoning has to do with change over time. To call these people conversos would imply that their transformation into real Christians is complete. To Silíceo, it is not. The confesos confess Christianity, but their ancestors continue to act on their present. This is why in his list of reasons, Silíceo projected the word into a deeper past, speaking of confesos antiguidados.⁷³ Citing the bible, Silíceo says that “a little yeast infects the whole mass,” and apparently, the current confesos remain part of the mass of their ancestors. Their birth is poisonous, and those born of heretical great grandparents will still display heresy. The logic of lineage is now all-encompassing. Confesos have not inherited faith. Silíceo discusses the nature of confesos less as an attempt to uncover disingenuous conversion (he considers the deceits of confeso obvious and inevitable) and more as one revealing a material, transhistorical phenomena that cannot be changed by his opponent’s arguments. He insists that the quality of faith is found even among lowly Old Christians, but not among those of confeso lineage:

Every year we see, throughout the Inquisitions of Spain, many of them burned and reconciled for being heretics and violators of the faith they received in baptism; for whom it profits little to be noble, illustrious, or learned; for, with all these graces they have from God, they deny Him, not recognizing His Son as the Messiah promised in the law, as we saw this year with that heretic who was burned in Cordoba and many others who have been burned, who said that the Messiah and Redeemer had not yet come.⁷⁴

It is chilling to see the Inquisitorial logic reinforce itself here. The more burnings there are, the more evidence there is for continued relapses into Judaism. Silíceo says that so many of these confesos deny the Messiah, theoretically leaving open the possibility of a few true confesos. Yet this is constricted by his previous insistence on their categorical prosperity over and above old Christians, which saddles them with the ancient stereotype of Jewish wealth. By linking confesos to those who waver in their conversion and deny God’s son, Silíceo discursively sets back the clock on conversion and reverts confesos into Jews, as if there were no time between them and their ancestors. There is no meaningful difference for Silíceo between the Biblical Jews and the confesos burned by the Inquisition. This history lesson is Silíceo’s most recent so far, including a 1547 burning at Cordoba. In pointing out the Jewish prevarications of confesos, Silíceo concludes that baptism has its limits in Jewish blood. Baptism is a grace given by God, but the Jews are ungrateful. Silíceo takes the elitist assumption of his opponents – that old Christians are idiots – and ironically grants it, just to say that old Christians are the only possessors of full faith. Faith is genetic.

Nobility is Silíceo’s other major category of bodily inheritance, and it cannot exist alongside Judaism. The ignobility of Jews and confesos is also historicizable, as seen in this reason, which fascinatingly suggests the possibility of some pro-comunero sentiment on Silíceo’s part: “In the time of King Juan II, of Glorious Memory, the corregidor of this city of Toledo was Pedro Sarmiento. The confesos of the casta of Jews moved and rioted in this city against this corregidor and the Old Christians, pretending to be señores of this city in order to be able to Judaize …”.⁷⁵ Here, the confesos are not of the mere lineage of Jews, but of their very casta (literally, “caste”). Within mere decades of this statute’s creation, the term casta would be applied to famous American racial categories like mestizo and mulatto. Though the word raza is not here, a notion very much akin to race as we know it now discursively unites the current confesos, biblical Jews and Sarmiento’s troublesome casta of Jews. Silíceo praises Sarmiento for trying to remedy a situation in which these people pretended to be señores of the city, or its lords, a category which was linked to old ideas of nobility. The confeso (who remains a Jew by casta) can only play at señor status, and he does so in order to Judaize more easily.

These discursively Jewish problems exist outside Toledo. Silíceo is quick to mention that others would agree with his proposed solutions. In his third reason, he references a recent development: “In all the colleges of Spain, which are many, and even in the one at Bologna which was founded by the Archbishop of Toledo Don Gil de Albornoz, only people who are Old Christians are received as colleagues, chaplains and peers …”⁷⁶ Silíceo’s mention of Bologna is a jab at Diego de Castilla, head of the opposition, whose own Jewish lineage had come to light in his efforts to enter that college in 1530. Interpersonal enmity may explain the apparent mismatch between this statement’s banal reference to Bologna and the vitriolic evidence Silíceo used to support it:

Do not do or imitate their deeds, for they speak but don’t act. They lay on men’s shoulders heavy burdens that they can’t bear, and don’t want to move with a finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by men. They make their phylacteries large and their tassels long. They love the first seats at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, to be treated with reverence in the marketplace and called teachers. They’re hypocrites who close the kingdom of heaven off from men. They don’t enter it and don’t let in those who were going to enter. They devour widows’ houses, even as they make long prayers for them. They cross sea and land to convert one to their law, and once converted, they make that one twice as bad as themselves. They are blind and guides of the blind. They can’t eat a mosquito but swallow a camel. They cleanse what is outside in the chalice or cup, and inside they are full of robbery and filth. They are similar to white tombs that seem beautiful to men from the outside but inside are full of the bones of the dead and all manner of filth. In this way, they appear to men to be righteous, but inside they are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. They are relatives and offspring of vipers. Jesus Christ must have known them well, since He is God, and for that reason couldn’t lie.⁷⁷

Silíceo both paraphrases and comments on Matthew 23. The anti-Pharisee critiques of these lines have long been hard to separate from general anti-Judaism. The confesos, like the Jew-coded Pharisees, are similar to whitewashed tombs that appear beautiful to men from the outside but inside are full of the bones of the dead, of all manner of filth. Silíceo believes this history needs revisiting, a re-revealing. Like those alleged confeso bones in Cartagena, it must be dug up. It is a history of past and present Jewish action. There is a closing of temporal space between the biblical narrative and Silíceo’s description of admittance to college in Bologna. When Silíceo paraphrases the scriptures in this way, it’s not clear if he imagines himself to be citing them or simply describing Jews in the world as he sees them. He emphasizes that Christ couldn’t lie, rendering the possibility of real conversion uninteresting, choosing instead to establish a direct line between the Jewish problems known to Christ and his own, thus collapsing the boundary between confeso and Jew. Jews (who are now discursively also their biological descendants) shirk work. They care only for appearances.

For Silíceo, history is one long attempt to eliminate so-called Jewish temptations. In their ninth reason for opposing, which cites the bad reputation Spain has for limpieza disputes on the broader European stage, the opponents appeal to a different sense of Spanish history. If Silíceo shows a Spain eternally imperiled by Jews, these men appeal to something like the Spanish nation, which is threatened by the innovations of limpieza statutes:

In other nations where they hear of the divisions caused by these statues, they’ll think of Spain as full of heretics and apostates, even though Spain is currently the purest and most Catholic province in the world. Certainly, this opinion and infamy will never stop while these statutes and divisions continue. They’ve ceased in the other realms of Christendom, even those who in past times had no fewer infidels than Spain (infidels who’ve been gradually converted little by little, just like in Spain). Yet because these innovations have not been made with the newly converted and with their descendants, as has been and is being done in Spain, the natives of those realms, so close to us, are generally considered Old Christians. To prove that a person is an Old Christian, it is sufficient to prove that his father was French. By contrast, we see that Spaniards, however noble and pure they may be, are called marranos wherever they go outside this realm.⁷⁸

Apparently, France is full of easily identifiable Old Christians. The anxiety about Spain’s international reputation as marranos, that old word for forcibly converted Jews, is acutely felt. It inspires Silíceo’s opponents to think historically:

Look at the histories of France, which was the most noble and Catholic realm in all of Christendom. One finds that at the same time that in Spain the first conversion of the Jews was happening, as mandated by King Sisebut, the same was being done in France by King Dagobert. Innumerable Jews converted then. Some were from Spain, which had been united by King Sisebut. Others were ancient residents of the [French] realm.⁷⁹

The opponents continue with the expulsions and conversions of Phillip II, Phillip IV, and Louis X:

And with all that, never in those times or these times was a nation so defamed as ours […] in our own Spain it is certain that never after the first conversion of King Sisebut have there been other conversions from three hundred or four hundred years ago, as seen in the ancient laws of these realms, which speak of the newly converted. But statutes were never introduced.⁸⁰

The cleansing conversions of must be well-remembered, because they prove that there are simply no Jews in Spain, a homeland of which the speakers felt protective. In foreign nations without statutes, such issues of descent have already been forgotten. The opponents hope this could happen in Spain, too. It’s already occurred among the descendants of Muslims, or moros.

The same is true for the converts of the moros, who are innumerable in the villages; laborers, who through pacts with the Christian Kings stayed in their houses and lands (haciendas) and then were converted. Among their descendants, there is no memory of not having been with the Christians. As it is with low people, they don’t tell any accounts.⁸¹

Here, the categories of worker, ruralness (hacienda), and reconquered Moors combine to create a sense of the masses. Apparently, poor people don’t tell histories (the opposition’s elitism was not a figment of Silíceo’s imagination). The opponents argue that limpieza distinctions have ceased to exist in communal memory, suggesting that the fighting itself keeps them alive:

There is not a single infidel left in Spain. Their memory and that of their descent could soon run out. Be careful with these statutes that conserve it and make it so there will always be some notorious memory of them, making it so that no antiquity would be sufficient, not even five hundred years, to make an Old Christian, so no passing of time would suffice to wear away and clean this infamy, as it has been in other realms, where there is much more occasion than in our own.⁸²

As seen in the dating and the term antiquity, historical time is the framework through which the lineage must be understood. For the contradictors, Spain’s history, with its converting kings and amnesic Moorish peasants, has successfully homogenized itself. It is no fantasy to hear a real fear of violence in their plea to be careful with these statutes.

The opposition has put Silíceo in a difficult position. He cannot disagree with concerns over Spain’s greatness. In his response to their objections, Silíceo agrees, remarkably, that there is a problem with Spain’s international reputation. He identifies as the cause the real continued presence of the descendants of heretics in Spain, not the statutes themselves:

This perpetual infamy is found in all nations in which there are heretics or descendants of them, although there are no statutes in other nations similar to ours in Spain. It is clear that our nation is not to be considered infamous because it has some statutes and laws that other nations do not have. In Castile there is a law that a husband may behead his wife if he proves she is an adulteress, and therefore it must be said that this kingdom of Castile is infamous for having a similar law and statute, which is not found in other foreign nations.⁸³

This last comparison should dispel any doubt that Silíceo relished violence, or at least the idea of it. Women are not mentioned elsewhere in the statute’s documents.

To say that similar statutes engender infamy in the nation where they are kept is to say that the statutes are infamous or unjust in where they come from, [but] the Pope and the Emperor, our lords, have confirmed similar statutes, and to affirm that what they do is unjust, that what they do results in infamy for the things of the realm. To openly affirm this is to move against and conspire against your superiors, and with little difficulty, we can taste this as heresy, or that it has the flavor of that.⁸⁴

Silíceo thus accuses his opponents of heresy for daring to see anything negative in statutes that have been approved by the authorities and compares them to the heretics of Germany who go against the Pope. He then defends the statute from the charge of perpetuating infamy among other nations:

We say it’s nothing new for Spaniards to be taken for marranos in other nations. Long before statutes like this one, they used this word to refer to both Old Christians and confesos, which they will not do from now on, once they learn that there are two lineages of men in Spain: Old Christians, who never stumbled in faith nor had any ancestors who did, and confesos, descendants of heretics and men who are enemies of our faith. When they learn that a statute like this one exists in Spain, they won’t think that all are confesos, as they currently do.⁸⁵

In Spain, there are two types of men, born into fixed lineages that don’t change over time. By pursuing apartheid, Silíceo suggests, Spain will prove the purity of real Spaniards, silencing French whispers of marrano. To the claim that a man in France can prove his Old Christian status simply by proving his Frenchness, Silíceo says the following.

It’s true that in France many infidels converted, as can be seen from history. They were mostly gentiles, not Jews. Since they converted voluntarily, they remained in the faith, and from then until now have not fallen from it. For this reason, it wasn’t necessary to make a statute like ours. Until just a little while ago, the Inquisition existed in France, but because they’re all Old Christians, there was little need for it.⁸⁶

France is very Old Christian, because most of its converts were descended from gentiles, not Jews. This attested history of a gentile to Christian trajectory is the ideal, a fantasy of very Old Christianness. By comparing the two places, Silíceo suggests that Old Christianness is something France and Spain could share (if only Spain could shake off her Jewish past) for it springs from ancient gentile conversion. These gentiles, the ancestors of those who never stumbled in the faith, were found on both sides of the Pyrenees, albeit in unequal quantities. Silíceo imagines a history that can prove that ancient Spaniards and ancient Frenchmen both have pure lineages. These lineages are stable across historical time and geographic space. These lineages are distinctly French and Spanish yet unified by an Old Christianness that comes from gentile ancestry. This freely given gentile faith is handed down the generations. In this way, Old Christianness is something like America’s whiteness, insofar as whiteness can both encompass regions and subdivide into smaller ethnicities.

Silíceo is frustrated by those who suggest that the gentile conversions of the deep French and Spanish pasts could compare to newer Jewish conversion. Importantly, he concedes that the good converts could theoretically include Moors or Jews from long ago, writing that “in Spain, those that converted in ancient times out of their own will to become Christians, including Moors and Jews, all their descendants will be called Old Christians, because there is no memory of their ancestor’s apostasy, and they have never parted from the faith they received.”⁸⁷ Yet this tidy past wherein Moors, Jews and Spain-based gentiles alike happily embraced Christianity is long gone. It’s irrelevant to those whose recent lineages are written in the Inquisition books Silíceo mentions in this same passage.

Nearly all today called confesos descend from Jews converted against their will not long ago. Most have apostatized and are heretics. For this reason, the Catholic Kings of glorious memory with the authority of the Pope our Lord, put in place the Holy Inquisition, where almost all have been reconciled as heretics, and many of them burned.⁸⁸

Silíceo then gives numbers to show that virtually all confesos are heretics, and continues:

Because every day we see in these kingdoms of Spain so many of them being reconciled and burned, it’s a just thing to put this statute as a restriction, so that at least in this holy church there is no one who brings the smell of confeso nor brings the origin of heretical parents or grandparents.⁸⁹

The threat of real violence was obviously present, and the alleged confesos listening to Silíceo would have had few options left once he declared heresies heritable. France was quite lucky to have less Jews and more gentiles in its past gene pool. For Silíceo, the odor of these heretics is not about the body. It is a metaphor for his own subjective experience of sniffing out raza, of coming to find, identify, uncover, and discard anything that smells of Jews, Moors, and heretics. To him, the world stinks of this odor, and his enemies are like smokers unoffended by the smell of cigarettes only because they themselves are reeking.

6 Universal Histories of Adam, Judaism and Blackness

Recall that not all dissent to Silíceo’s history lessons came from within the cathedral’s factions. Consider the letter from Alcalá sent to the opposing dean.⁹⁰ Like Silíceo, these writers started with a history. They chose the earliest one imaginable: Adam.

All born since the beginning of the world, and all born until its end, of whatever generation or whatever heritage they may be; we all come from one Adam and are redeemed by Christ, the true Son of God. The good Christian is proximate to all types of people. Divine Providence, knowing that the differences that exist between men had to be so, gave us the natural, theological and moral rules that, if used well, permit us to deserve the enjoyment of eternal life.⁹¹

God made distinctions between people for some necessary reason during Adam’s time or even previously. The good Christian accepts these as part of God’s plan and gets close to all kinds of people.

At various times God took pity on the gentiles by placing believers among them, as with Ruth and her husband’s uncle, and Tamar and Judas, her father-in-law, for through him she was spared from losing nobility. Tamar had two sons. One inherited nobility, the other was a reputed villano. And so this descended from noble to noble until it was planted in the most blessed Mother of God, from whose flesh, by the work of the Holy Spirit, came the true Messiah. Through his belief all were ennobled, through his faith all his believers are saved, and by his true name, Christ, all of us who follow him take the name of Christians, whether they be gentiles, Jews, blacks, or whatever monstrous nation.⁹²

Even this full-throated defense of universalism does not deny nobility. Rather, it places nobility with Christianity itself. The authors appeal to a Christian sense of history – the sense that the present is a Messianic age – to argue for all believers as the inheritors of Christ’s noble legacy. The examples of those eligible for conversion gets more radical as the list goes on. The terms Gentile and Jew echo Galatians 3:28, but the term blacks slips almost imperceptibly into those unknown monstrous nations. This flash of hypothetical blackness reflected concerns that would have been well-known to the elites of Toledo, albeit not of acute importance in their own city. Debra Blumenthal noted that “by the end of the fifteen century, black Africans made up as much as forty percent of the slave population of Valencia.”⁹³ According to María Elena Martínez, Spanish ideology only occasionally construed reproduction with Spaniards as redemptive for Indios, and it almost never “allowed blacks the possibility of full ‘redemption.’”⁹⁴ Larissa Brewer-García explains how Covarrubias connected the color black to “what he presumes to be the lowly position of black people themselves in Iberian societies” and associated white with castidad, limpieza, and alegría.⁹⁵ Of course, not all living under Iberian political dominion ascribed to such assessments. Chloe Ireton has uncovered stories of “black men and women successfully claiming pure Old Christian lineages rooted in African origins that permitted them to access privileges typically reserved for Catholic Castilians.”⁹⁶

For the men of Alcalá’s university and Toledo’s cathedral, the most important sites of the reworking of the meanings of blackness were far from home, in this period. Monstrosity was an older phenomena. Nations and groups called genus had been associated with monstrosity since before Pliny the Elder (d. 79).⁹⁷ For the humanists of Alcalá, the extreme example of monstrosity attests Christianity’s ability to transform even the basest peoples. This passage, labeled “monster” and dated to 1547, is found in the manuscript containing Silíceo’s documents, belonging to the playwright Sebastián de Horozco.⁹⁸

The wife of a gestero, already six or seven months pregnant, birthed a dead creature that had two heads and one body and two arms and four legs and in the middle of each was a pair of legs, one of which had the nature of man. A thing of wonder. Many people in the city saw it, and I saw it. I put it here so it might be remembered ad perptuam. The archbishop of Toledo Don Juan Martinez Silíceo took it to the ladies that were, at the time, in Alcalá de Henares, so that they might see it.⁹⁹

True or not, this story of popular interest in a monstruous child shows that monstrosity, an ancient category, circulated as a discourse in Silíceo’s contemporary Toledo. The comparison between blacks and monsters would have been a meaningful one.

The next generation of anti-limpieza thinkers would also use blackness to show their commitment to Christian universalism. Agustín Salucio provided a reformist voice in his 1599 work on the limpieza statutes. He had his own copy of Silíceo’s work.¹⁰⁰ Like Silíceo and his opponents, Salucio responds to a list of reasons:

There is no power on Earth to exclude that which Christ our Lord has made right. This is likewise true of the priesthood, the bishopric, preaching and the administration of the Sacraments, for all those honors were instructed by Christ our Lord for all the nations of the world. No one has the power to exclude any nation from them. If the Ethiopians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese became Christian, sufficiently cultivated, with good understanding and doctrine, and able and capable to move past the novice stage of their Christianity, then it would become right to have priests and bishops of their nation.¹⁰¹

Neither the universalism nor the colonial condescension can surprise those familiar with European history. More interesting is the example Salucio goes on to provide:

As an example, we present the case of what would happen if a new military order were to be established, and it asked for Castilians, such that Aragonese were excluded. If the king were persuaded that there was no honor in the Aragonese as there are in the Castilians, that there was no reason to fear them, who could doubt that he would want to exclude them? From his view, better to have more honorable vassals.¹⁰²

The imagined Christian aspirations of Ethiopians, Indians, Chinese and Japanese are insufficient as human examples through which the pain of exclusion can be seen. Yet their plight is directly comparable to Castilian-Aragonese hostility. Salucio reaches first for black Ethiopians, as the letter from Alcalá reached for black people (negros), but his mental map unfurls also towards the Orient.

Comparisons between blackness and Jewish descent may have been used elsewhere in the early modern Mediterranean, which scholars understand as highly interconnected. Consider the case of the bildis, a Moroccan neo-Muslim community that was marked as the descendants of Jewish converts into the modern era. In 1641, an anti-neo-Muslim manifesto was published in Fez, some decades after the group had been expelled from the city market. Neo-Muslim scholar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Mayyāra compiled a response.¹⁰³ Like Silíceo’s opponents, his text consisted of legal evidence. Like the men of Alcalá, he opened with Adam and the importance of universal acceptance:

What the illustrious scholars have previously mentioned is true, nothing else is permissible in the Muslim community, and no one denies it except he who shows his ignorance and the weakness of his intellect. Islam relies on what went before, and the Muslims are as brothers, and all of you are from Adam, and Adam is from clay. “Indeed, the most noble among you is the most pious.” (Quran 49:13)¹⁰⁴

Here, the Quran links nobility (sharaf) to piety, a move that represents the Islamic tradition’s own universalizing aspect. Mayyāra returns to this point several times, but the qualifiers needed to explain this universalism are telling. In one of seventeen supporting legal treatises, the idea of Islam’s triumph over difference appears as it was reported by Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 855) in his famous hadith collection: “Oh people, indeed your Lord is one, and indeed your fathers are one, such that the Arab is not favored over the non-Arab, nor the non-Arab over the Arab, and not the red over the black or the black over the red except in piety.”¹⁰⁵ Mayyāra’s imagined black bodies were not monstrous as those at Alcalá, but his choice of this passage is curious given the total lack of dark-skinned characters in his story. He used this image to defend those of alleged Jewish descent no less than three times. Apparently, we can find thinkers who used figures of universal history (like Adam) to create racial discourses broad enough to encompass categories as apparently disparate as blackness and Judaism, in both the Muslim and Christian early modern worlds.

7 Conclusion

In 1449, during the Castilian Civil War, Pedro Sarmiento wrote a treatise excluding conversos from Toledo’s city government. In 1547, Juan Martínez Silíceo wrote a statute meant to exclude conversos, now confesos, from the Toledo cathedral, one section of which was already technically forbidden to them, as it housed the Capilla de los Reyes Nuevos. His polemics would be read by critics and sympathizers and even defended by Porreño.

It is no shock that Silíceo attempted to keep Old Christianness for himself, even as he levelled a surprisingly strident critique of aristocracy. His writings surprise with the issues they raise. They contain evidence for the reception of limpieza at the Habsburg court, the role of cultural competition with France and Italy in Spain’s reuses of limpieza, the connotation of converso versus confeso, anxieties over Protestantism, and others. Most importantly, they help us better appreciate how an old hatred could be put to ever new uses, even in old Toledo, which few would place at the center of the racial violences Spain was perpetuating by the middle of the sixteenth century.