La Vera Cruz: Wills, Confraternities, Catholic Reconquest and Reform in Sixteenth-Century Gibraltar

Abstract

In his Historia de Gibraltar, the Gibraltar-born jurado Alonso Hernández del Portillo described how “the confraternity of the Santa Vera Cruz has a fine and pleasant church on the Main Street”. Set in the heart of town, it was an impressive building, which caused the missionary Pedro Cubero Sebastián to describe it as “most excellent” in the late seventeenth-century. Within the church existed the confraternity’s pride and joy: el Cristo de la Vera Cruz, a miraculous image of the crucified Christ and a key feature of local devotion. Using unpublished testamentary evidence, this article explores the early years of this local manifestation of Christological devotion, as well as the devotional context out of which it grew. The timeline established by these wills not only allows us to place this church and confraternity, and therefore Gibraltar, within the context of the Catholic Reformation, but to locate these religious developments as part of a prolonged process of Christianisation which began with the city’s reconquest in 1462.