Social Crisis and Conversion: Apostasy and Inquisition in the Chronicles of Fernando del Pulgar and Andres Bernaldez

Abstract

For Francisco Marquez-Villanueva FEW if any scholars have sought to examine the writings chronicling the events at Seville from 1478-81 leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from Castile in 1492 from a purely textual, rhetorical, and literary perspective. Yet upon close examination, two histories recording these events, Andres Bernaldez and Fernando del Pulgar's respective Memories del reinado de los Reyes Catolicos and Cronica de los Reyes Catolicos, provide a means by which to measure not only the incidents leading to the diaspora of 1492, but the way they were transformed by two witnesses from a record of experience-an observation of things done, said, and seen-into a critique embodying heterogenous points of view and drastically different ideological positions on a burning social and religious issue. Bernaldez, known as El cura de Los Palacios, was chaplain to Diego de Deza, the archbishop of Seville who later became the Inquisitor General of Castile. A cristiano viejo, Bernaldez was born in the province of Leon around 1454 and became curate of the town of Los Palacios near Seville in 1488, where he served until his death in 1516. His chronicle of the Catholic Kings, which Rodrigo Caro (1573-1647), the famed antiquarian from Seville, claimed was written as a testigo de vista de los sucesos (Memorial xi), provides a particularly interesting description of the events leading up to the Expulsion of the Jews.1 Similarly, Pulgar, who was a converso and secretary to Queen Isabel, whose history begun in 1482 and was often confused with Bernaldez's, offers enhanced insight into the way conversos all too close to these events assessed them.2 In these two relations of the early repression of the alleged apostates and Jews of Seville in the years leading up to the creation of the Inquisition, we can trace the manner in which each author fashioned his interpretation of history, and how each was compelled by personal identity and ideological convictions to recast and accommodate the events narrated to certain patterns and models of history. If closely scrutinized, Bernaldez's and Pulgar's accounts leading up to the creation of the Inquisition and eventually to the Expulsion exhibit a distinct dichotomy. On the one hand, Pulgar's narrative is marked by a predominance of direct, business-like observation, with few comparisons, little learned embellishment, and an absence of interpretive displays. In its discursive configuration, Pulgar evokes the occurrences and the immediate consequences of the crisis as they unfolded. Although at first glance it seems like a listing of things that happened, on second consideration there appears to be a coherent interest in exposing motivating forces that determines both the structure of the narrative and what is told. While the events and their details catch Pulgar's attentive eye and are listed in order, they remain for him eschatologically insignificant insofar as they are neither interpreted nor perceived to belong to any pattern of metaphysical signification. They represent a sequence of artfully deployed descriptions and observations that resist accommodation to a master narrative that provides a sobering picture of what happened. Any interpretive passages one encounters in Pulgar's narrative are invariably shaped by a perception of the direct social impact of and reasons behind the occurrences, an understanding of the workings of secular political power, and the desire to foreground the economic dimensions of the events he characterizes. Bernaldez, on the other hand, seeks a larger meaning in the repression of the Jews and the occurrences leading up to it. As an historical account of the events in and around Seville between 1478-- 81, it is not enough, for Bernaldez, to chronicle the actual events or simply present what happened in cold sequential order. Although his text follows a chronology and has a foundation in fact, it acquires a structure that endows the sequence of the things he reports with a higher order of meaning and a global interpretation. …