Purity of Blood

Cruel nation, which Hadrian exiled,only to make its way to Spain,has oppressed and defiledour Holy Christian empire,and with persistent barbaritydefamed the Spanish Monarchy.

Or that other great playwright, don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who would later put these words in the mouth of one of his famous characters:

Oh, the accursed swine!Many burned at the stake,and it gave me such joyto see them blaze, that I said,as I fanned the flames,“Heretic dogs, behold a judgeof the Holy Inquisition.”

Not to forget don Francisco de Quevedo—the same Quevedo who, in the dark of night, without hesitation hastened to effect a point of honor and aid a friend of converso blood, himself composed no few verses and lines of prose reviling the tribe of Moses. In our day, with the Protestants and Moors burned or exiled, the incorporation of the Kingdom of Portugal during the reign of our good and great Philip II had provided an abundance of secret or public Jews into which to sink our collective teeth, and the Inquisition kept sniffing around them like the jackal noses out carrion. And Jews were another of the reasons that brought the king’s favorite, don Gaspar de Guzmán, the Conde de Olivares, into a confrontation with the Supreme Council. In his attempt to keep the vast heritage of the Austrias intact, as he squeezed dry the exhausted purses of vassals and threatened the selfish interests of nobles, waged a war in Flanders, and struggled to break the backs of Aragon and Catalonia, the Conde-Duque, as he was known, weary of the monarchy’s being held hostage to Genoese bankers, wished to replace them with Portuguese brokers. Their purity of blood might be in doubt, but their money was old Christian, clean, and available to fill Spain’s empty coffers. That plan put the favorite at cross-purposes with the councils of state, the Inquisition, and the papal nuncio himself, while our lord and king, good-natured and extremely religious, weak in matters of conscience as in many other things, wavered indecisively. In the end, he chose to beat the last maravedí out of all his subjects rather than contaminate the Faith.

All of which, to put it in a nutshell, was like making bread from hosts, or the other way ’round…however you look at it, a disaster. And as time went on, by midcentury, with the Conde de Olivares’s fall from favor, the Holy Office’s bill came due for collection and it unleashed one of the cruelest persecutions of converted Jews known to Spain. That was the ruin of Olivares’s project, and many crucial Hispano-Portuguese bankers and suppliers took themselves off to other countries such as Holland, and with them their wealth and their commerce, to the benefit of the enemies of our crown. In other words, it all ended with our royally fucking ourselves over. And I say “ended,” because between the nobles and the priests here, and the heretics there, and the whore who gave birth to them all, we bled till there was no blood left to bleed. The skinny dog gets the fleas, and we Spanish do not need anyone to ruin us; when it comes to the killing blow, we can deliver it ourselves.

So, in short, there I was, a beardless youth in the midst of all these maneuverings and machinations, and I was about to pay with my young neck. I sighed disconsolately. Then I looked toward my questioner, still the younger Dominican. The scribe was waiting, his pen poised above the paper, looking at me as if I were someone who presented every qualification for becoming good charcoal.

“I know no de la Cruz family,” I replied finally, with all the conviction I could muster. “Therefore, I have no way of knowing about the purity of their blood.”

The scribe bent his head as if he had awaited that answer, his pen scratching as he performed his filthy office. The lean old priest never took his eyes from me.

“Do you know,” my tormentor asked, “that Elvira de la Cruz has been accused of inciting Hebrew practices among her fellow nuns and novices?”

I swallowed. Or rather, I tried. Blood of God, I tried. But my mouth was dry as a pebble. The trap had closed, and it was a devilishly malefic one. Again I denied any knowledge, more and more afraid to hazard where all this was leading.

“Do you know that her father and brothers and other accomplices, as Judaizing as she, attempted to free her after she was discovered and confined by the chaplain and the prioress of the convent?”