The Trial of Catarina da Orta on two Continents
Susana Bastos Matheus
The Alberto Beveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies, University of Lisbon
and
History of Religious Studies, Catholic University of Portugal
Carla Costa Vieira
CHAM – Center for the Humanities, NOVA University, Lisbon
and
The Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies, University of Lisbon
With
Dale Luis Menezes
Georgetown University
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Dale Luis Menezes: Hello and welcome to the special web series on the Goa Inquisition. The series introduces you to the most recent research produced by internationally recognized scholars. I am Dale Luis Menezes. Our guests will give you a glimpse of their research, as well as the research that has taken place over the last half century.
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You will hear directly from the experts about the nature of state and religious violence, as well as the challenges an historian faces in researching a difficult topic such as the history of the Inquisition. Our web series aims to educate the general public about the various aspects of this historical phenomenon.
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The web series is supported by the Al-Zulaij Collective in Goa. Additionally, the series is also supported by the History of the Inquisitions Group, a group of scholars spread across the world with institutional support from the Center for Religious History Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal, and of the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies at the University of Lisbon. We thank all of them for their generous moral support.
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Our guest today for the last and final episode of the Web series are Susana Bastos Matheus and Carla Costa Vieira.
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Susana Matheus is a researcher at the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies and a member of the History of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal. She’s also a member of the History of the Inquisitions Research Group. Her research focuses on the impact of forced conversions on the first generation of New Christians, for instance, the impact on the Sephardic diaspora in the 16th century. Welcome Susana!
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Susana Bastos Matheus: Thank you.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Our next guest is Carla Costa Vieira who is a researcher at CHAM or the Center for the Humanities at the NOVA University in Lisbon, and also at the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies at the University of Lisbon. She is currently developing her post-doctoral project title “Nation between Empires: New Christians and the Portuguese Jews in Anglo-Portuguese relations in the first half of the 18th century,” which is funded by the FCT. She’s also the editor of the journal ‘Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas’. Welcome to the series, Carla!
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Carla Vieira: Thank you, Dale.
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Dale Luis Menezes: The episode today is a special one. We have two parts for this episode. In the second part, our guests who are experts in their field of study will demonstrate how an historian read documents. This means that all you viewers will be able to see for yourself firsthand how the documents of an Inquisitorial trial, the ‘processos’, as they are called looked.
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Susana and Carla are going to read for us the trial, or processo, of Catarina da Orta or the sister of the great doutor Garcia da Orta. We in Goa are familiar with him as his memory lives amidst us through the public garden in Panjim, the Jardim Garcia da Orta. So we look forward to familiarizing ourselves with the inquisitorial document and the manner in which an historian read such documents. Part II, therefore, is a master class on ‘how to’ read an old document, in this case and inquisitorial document.
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Catarina da Orta, like her brother, was a New Christian. She was tried for judaizing, that is to say that the Inquisition suspected her for harboring crypto-Jewish beliefs and practices. The text of the trial was recently published by Susana, Carla and Miguel which is another reason why we decided to focus our last episode on the trial of Catarina da Orta.
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Catarina da Orta’s life provides us with an important way to understand several issues or terms that frequently crop up in inquisitorial documents, such as ‘New Christians’ and ‘crypto-Jews’. The scholarship on these issues and the people tried by the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian inquisitions is vast and perhaps it may have some important lessons to understand some aspects of the Goan case better.
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We cannot say exactly how and what aspects as a lot of research still needs to take place in the future. As such, in the first part of the interview Susana and Carla will provide a brief sketch about the life and trial of Catarina da Orta. We shall then dive a bit deeper into what these terms ‘New Christian’ and ‘crypto-Jew’ mean in the light of debates that have been taking place in Europe, America and Latin America, for the past 60 or 70 years. Let us start now with the first part.
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My first question to you is, could you very briefly provide us with some historical and contextual details about the life and trial of Catarina da Orta. I believe she was tried, both in Europe and Goa, right?
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Carla Vieira: Yes. Thank you, Dale. Probably, the most well-known tale about Catarina da Orta’s life is that Dale has already mentioned at the start is the fact that she was the sister of Garcia da Orta, the famous Portuguese physician. Other details about her life, not comprehensive at all, mostly derived from her Inquisitorial trials or her two Inquisitorial trials, in particular the second one in 1568.
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Then, at the moment of her arrest in Goa, Catarina da Orta was about 55 years old, this means that she was born in about 1513 in Castelo de Vide. Castelo de Vide is in the center of Portugal, near the Spanish border. Her parents, Leonor Gomes and Fernão da Orta were originally from Spain and had moved to Portugal in 1492 after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
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A few years later, they faced the same situation in Portugal, and then were converted to Christianity. Therefore, they belong to the first generation of Jewish converts in Portugal. So, Catarina and her siblings, including Garcia da Orta, had already been born and raised as Catholics.
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However, the Inquisition was only established at the end of 1536 [in Portugal] when Catarina da Orta was a young woman. And by this time, she had married Lionel Gonçalves in Castelo de Vide and sometime later they moved to Lisbon, probably with the aim of leaving Portugal and going to India.
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When Catarina was arrested for the first time in May of 1547, together with her sister, Violante da Orta, she was leaving in Lisbon and was mother of five children, including the newborn boy. Catarina and her sister were accused by their neighbors of not working on Saturdays and other behaviors that were connected to Judaism.
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This first trial did not include a sentence so later she would tell that she and her sister ended up being freed without any penalty, since it was proven that the accusation was false. After this first trial, Catarina did not take very long to leave Portugal in March of 1549. She set sail for Goa with her husband, children, as well as their mother and the other sister, Isabel da Orta.
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In Goa, she found her brother, Garcia da Orta, but she did not find the peace nor security. In the late 50s, the repression over the New Christians in Goa increased which culminated in the establishment of the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Goa. So, the Orta family was not immune to these growing tension since the mid-60s.
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Catarina saw relatives being arrested by the Inquisition and in the October of ‘68, it was her third time that she had been denounced by a relative, António Gomes, but later other accusations arrived at the Inquisition. Then her husband, Lionel Gonçalves was also arrested in the meanwhile, and this ended up compromising even more her situation, since then the Inquisitors found some contradictions between their confessions and fully explored them.
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Also, with the passing of time, Catarina’s confession became more and more inconsistent, so often marked by advances and setbacks and the degradation of her case culminated with her condemnation on September 25 of 1569 Catarina da Orta died burnt at the stake, and so this is Catarina da Orta’s life in five minutes. Very briefly.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Yeah, could you maybe elaborate a little bit about how the trial took place in Goa? What was the reason why there were so many inconsistencies in their confession or in their depositions?
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Carla Vieira: Yes. Because the trial lasted over a lot of time, so the problem was that Lionel Gonçalves, her husband gave a different confession regarding other practices, and other Jewish offenses, or supposed Jewish offenses, that Catarina didn’t confess to. So then their confessions ended up being contradictory and this was completely explored by the Inquisitors and this is mostly the main reason why Catarina was condemned and the Inquisitors found that her confession was not complete and was not true.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Right and my next question is relating to again who Catarina da Orta was. And since she was a New Christian woman could we remind our viewers who the New Christians were?
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Susana Mateus: Well, when we talk about New Christians, we can talk about two realities, the first one, in general, what we can talk about an individual who is newly converted to Catholicism in general terms that is a New Christian. But for early modern historians, there is actually a consensus about the using of this kind of term to refer to a specific religious minority, the Jewish minority and also to specific context, in geographical terms and also chronologically.
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So basically, we are talking about the Iberian Peninsula, and we are talking about the late 14th century, mostly the 15th century and maybe the first years on 16th century. We are talking about a violent reality of expulsions, forced conversions, and also forced individual conversions but also forced mass conversions.
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We have two key moments to understand this social reality. I can point out the year of 1492 with the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon. And, for instance, that is the framework of Garcia da Orta’s and Catarina da Orta’s family because they were the descendants of these Jews expelled from Castile.
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And then the other key moment will be 1496 with the decree of expulsion of the Jews from Portugal, but 1497 with the mass conversion of the Jews in Portugal. The problem of this kind of events, abrupt and violent ones is that we have like a change, a massive change, in the social reality of the Kingdom.
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We have a new reality of these New Christians, newly converted, with no indoctrination at all, or very incipient indoctrination to the Catholic faith. So we have a tensed situation regarding this kind of population. And this is one of the causes that will bring so many problems in 16th century and 17th century and so on regarding, for instance, the prosecutions made by the Inquisition.
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Dale Luis Menezes: So, there are these two ways to understand—there are two parts, basically to understand the New Christians, one is on an individual level: a person of Jewish heritage from the kingdoms that comprised Spain who were expelled from 1492 and converted to Catholicism, they are the New Christian but also it specifically refers to historical process within the Iberian empire and specifically, to the late 15th and the 16th century. That’s the two parts, just to recap, right?
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Susana Mateus: Yes, and we can say that, after a wave of anti-Jewish persecutions, anti-Jewish violence in Europe that started maybe in the 13th century, when we arrived at the end of the 14 century and also in the 15th century, we arrive at the Iberian Peninsula. We say these persecutions, the Jews who were expelled from so many kingdoms that they, at some point, they arrived and they stay in the Iberian Peninsula. So yes, we have a specific reality, regarding this concept of New Christians, that is shaped in a chronological frame, a specific framework regarding the geographical context of the Iberian Peninsula.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Right, and I think that gives a better sense of how to understand, not just the term but the people who are associated with the term when we encounter them in the history books or in documents.
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My next question is again about a definition and very often we hear the term ‘crypto-Jews’ and so who were the crypto Jews? Could you explain what ‘crypto’ means here specifically and I am much interested to unpack this first half of the term, ‘crypto’ in ‘crypto-Jews’.
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Carla Vieira: Yeah, first of all, we should be aware that crypto-Jews and crypto-Judaism are not the same concepts. Sometimes crypto-Jew is simply used in even endorsing the Inquisition’s narrative itself. And in the same way, it tends to be confused with New Christian and Susana has already explained who the New Christians were and the fact is that crypto-Jew has a different meaning.
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When we use the expression ‘crypto-Jew’ you are assuming that this person secretly keeps a set of beliefs or rituals or practices related to Judaism at the same time that she or he lives and behaves as a Christian in his or her public life. Actually, what the sources give us, mainly Inquisitorial records, fairly or maybe never, isn’t great enough to conclude that someone is indeed a secret Jew or not.
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However, the crypto-Judaism was a reality to the extent that the Inquisition fed for centuries, this idea of the persistence of secret Judaism among the New Christians. So, also the type of beliefs, behaviors, and practices that the Inquisition associated to the ‘crime’ of ‘Judaizar’ which is Judaizing, did not changed a lot since it’s early times. They mostly followed what was set down already in 1536, in the so-called ‘Monitorio Geral’, a list of heretical actions and offences that should be denounced to the Inquisition at the time of the establishment of the Tribunal.
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Namely, this practice, this action in the case of Judaizing or ‘Judaizar’ was observance of the Shabbat and some Jewish holidays and fests as Pesach and Kippur, for instance. The dietary loss, in other words not eating pork or not eating shellfish and so on, and some funeral rituals, the circumcision, keeping the Jewish prayer books or Torahs, and so on.
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What is interesting is that we find this practice, some of these practices in Catarina da Orta’s trial, as well as you find the same practice in other trials for instance in the 18th century. So, little changes, little changes! So in a nutshell, crypto-Judaism has a pernicious meaning while New Christians is a more ethnic or even a racial-grounded label. They are different concepts, but sometimes they are erroneously merged, but they are different concepts.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Okay, so I just need some clarification. Who coined the term crypto-Jew? Is it a coinage of the Inquisition, did they use the term or was it a later term used by historians or in general discussions in the public sphere?
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Carla Vieira: We don’t find the term crypto-Judaism or crypto-Jew in the Inquisitorial records or in other historical sources of that time. I don’t know when the concept was coined, but it was later, it’s used later by historians. I do not know if Susana has more information about this.
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Susana Mateus: I think [crypto-Jew] is the translation was done in the 19th century and early 20th century with this kind of ‘discovery’, as it was coined then at the time of some Jewish, so-called Jewish communities, in the interior of Portugal. It translates the term of the Inquisition, which is more like ‘secret Jew’ or ‘occult Judaism’, this kind of terminology, not the crypto one. So it will be a conceptual construction of another reality, an important reality for studies about Sephardism, Jewish communities and the Iberian Peninsula in the 19th century and early 20th.
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Dale Luis Menezes: So basically there were some communities that were found despite the whole history of persecution and someone had to make sense of how they survived all this right, and this [the concept of crypto-Judaism] was some kind of an explanation? Is that right?
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Susana Mateus: When some individuals ‘discovered’, and I use this term well—it’s not really a discovery. I am talking about the symbolic concept of a discovery of these occult communities, the survivors. So they created a genealogy from the first ones, so the first converted Jews or the first in the 15th century or in the beginning of the 16th century to the 20th century. Of course, historiography right now has many issues with this kind of genealogy as Carla was talking about, of course.
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It’s important to understand the chronology of things. We cannot think that an individual or a religious reality remains untouched for so many centuries, with no connections, with no changes, with no interaction with other realities, but it’s very important in some symbolic narrative about the identity of a part of Portugal, because at the time, there was a profound lack of understanding about this kind of reality in the history of Portugal or the Portuguese reality. So it was an important issue to this kind of narrative.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Right, and I take your point about how the process, you know the chronology as well as the historiographical process took place. Still, so, ‘crypto-Jew’ is again a very specific term applied within a specific Iberian context, whether in Iberia or also in the overseas empire right? But it also has many meanings.
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Is that a problem for historians? For instance, that it has these many meanings so is it possible to pin it down in one way or perhaps a few more ways. Is it possible to say something concrete with these concepts?
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Susana Mateus: Well, I think, it’s a very problematic concept. The historiography in the mid-20th century until the 80s more or less used this concept as a very important structural one. So you find in many important studies about Inquisition or the Inquisition and New Christians, the use of the term ‘crypto-Jew’.
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In two ways: two different and very antagonist ways. One, that the reality [of crypto-Judaism] that is unquestionable. So, in it was, like Carla was saying before, sometimes also with the kind of the equivalence between New Christians and crypto-Jews, so all New Christians must be crypto-Jews.
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And this is very dangerous, because in some ways we work or the historians that were doing this studies, work with these assumptions were, maybe, unconsciously reproducing also the Inquisitorial discourse, because the Inquisition sustained that all New Christians were, in a way, possibly crypto-Jews and enemies of Christianity and Catholicism. The other one, was denying absolutely with no question this, the use of this term, because it was a fiction constructed by the Inquisition itself.
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So, the next generation of historians, in the beginning of the 21st century had some difficulties in using this term. We are trying to write studies about New Christians but not about the religiosity of the New Christians, about other aspects of the life of New Christians: social aspects, economic ones, etc. And right now we are trying to have more dense analysis of the term crypto-Jews. Or not using it, or not, but the important thing is to have more dense, more complex and problematic analysis of the religiosity of the New Christians and of the person, the people were tried by the Inquisitions. So, I think we are in the middle of this kind of ‘changing’ in historiographical terms.
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Dale Luis Menezes: So, I have in relation to what you said one final question and again it’s relating to ‘crypto’ and perhaps I’ll be repeating a few things that you’ve already said. So what you said, and I’m asking this question precisely because the ‘crypto’ bit might have some use for us in understanding the Goa case better, although, of course, a lot of research needs to happen on the beliefs, cosmologies, and religious practices of those who were tried by the Goa Inquisition.
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Of course, you’re not specialist on Goan history, so we shall not—so we shall only focus on the meaning of, focus and explore a little more of the meaning of ‘crypto’ in the context of Sephardic Jewish history and, as you just mentioned, those two models, one of the models was that it considered all Judaizers as simply good Christians who made mistakes, right, and the other model was…the other interpretation of New Christian was the Jews who had converted always had a yearning to go back to the original religion.
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Thus, instances wherein New Christians left Portugal and Spain for places like the Ottoman Empire and Cochin or Goa, where they could network with other Jewish people was proof of this yearning. The fact that many of the New Christians got tried by the Inquisition, especially in Goa, was further proof of the New Christians wanting to go back to the Jewish fold. So, in a sense, the Inquisition, and both these interpretation works in the role of a self-fulfilling prophecy or a feedback loop, right?
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But, as you just said, both these models are not enough to explain the complexity of who a New Christian was, or who a crypto-Jew was. And you also mentioned about the non-religious aspects of their history. So could you reflect a little more on why these older interpretations are not enough?
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Susana Mateus: Yes, I think it’s a very important question for us, for all the historians that are studying today the history about New Christians in general. Or the New Christian diaspora, etc., etc. It’s a very, very important topic to reflect on. It’s a very difficult one, and the problem, and I will repeat it again, is the problem is that for so many years historiography was frozen in this dichotomy, so difficult to use between the two aspects you already mentioned.
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And we are trying, and some important studies are being written now trying to surpass this kind of dichotomic analysis. When we do that, we don’t have to run away from the religious question and we can use it and we can analyze it in a more complex way, as we should do when we are talking about religious identities, because, I think we can maybe one day, when studies are being made in a more substantial way, we can also compare realities, maybe also in with the case of Goa, it’s such a complex and important case to compare with other realities and also, for instance, some Christians in Japan is another important reality to compare.
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A part of the problem is, the historiography when debating the case of the so-called crypto-Judaism tends to analyze it like an essential identity that remained the same through time and what the [new] studies are showing us is also in the first generations, in even families that live a part of their lives in Judaism, so, for instance, the father was a forcibly converted man in 1497 or the mother. For instance, in the case of the Orta family, it’s very, very near the [time of] forced conversion.
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We can see that they were living in another reality, because there was a destruction of the Jewish life, Jewish normal life. So even if they were or not, and we cannot know for sure they were secret Jews and really believing in Judaism or not, but we know for sure that, even if that was the case that Judaism was not the same as before the forced conversion. And, for me, this is the key, as one of the key aspects of this kind of studies. We should understand that religious identities are very fluid, very changeable in time.
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In geographical terms also because, if a family changes from the Iberian Peninsula to Goa that will be another reality, completely different. And that has the consequences for the religious identity they have.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Thank you for that, and you have to forgive me I’m just going to repeat some of the main points that you made just so that I know that I’ve got it right, and hopefully it will benefit our viewers too.
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So, you started by saying it’s a difficult problem, it’s a difficult conceptual problem because, for one, when the historiography had started presumably from the 19th century, when scholars were trying to make sense of who a ‘crypto-Jew’ was, the Jewish identity was considered as an essential identity, that had not changed over time, that had not changed at all over the last 500 years right and, and this is a point that we’ve tried to make across in this series, in our previous episodes as well that it is very important to take into consideration change over time, in fact, this is what…This is the basic thing that historians, the one and only thing that historians try to explain to our audience right.
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And, secondly it’s not possible to know for sure whether they practiced Judaism in secret right, whether they were secretly Jews. I guess at this point we need to think about the interiority, what really lies inside a person. The third issue was that, even if they did practice Judaism in secret that was not necessarily the Judaism, the original Judaism of 1492 [or before] right, in that moment. So that Judaism was not frozen, in fact, even the secret Judaism, if at all it existed had probably changed over time and, finally, that religious identities are fluid and one shouldn’t take them as set in stone.
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So, thank you. That brings us to the end of Part I, and I think we have covered a lot of conceptual ground as far as how to understand particular aspects of the Inquisitorial history in Portugal or in Goa. Let us now move to the second part. And, and this is obviously the part where both of you would help us to, would demonstrate how an historian reads a document, but before we do that I would like to request you to introduce your ‘Serie Goana’ project in which the trial was published recently, and this was published by you.
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Both of you worked on it, but also your colleague Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, who we had met in episode five and if any of the viewers haven’t watched it, I would highly recommend that you do so as soon as possible. So, could you introduce, very briefly, what this project is about, why is it called Serie Goana, and so on.
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Carla Vieira: So the book about which we are talking today, the ‘processo’ of Catarina da Orta in the Inquisition of Goa is part of an editorial project undertaken by the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies since 2018, through the Usque Collection. The Usque Collection has the name inspired by two main figures of the Sephardic diaspora: Samuel Usque, the author of the ‘Consolação às Tribulações de Israel’ or ‘The Consolation for the tribulations of Israel’ and also Abraham Usque, the publisher of this masterpiece of Sephardic literature.
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The Usque Collection’s main objective is to publish documents related to the Sephardic diaspora in the history of the New Christians in Portugal and abroad. The first volume [in the collection] was the these ‘Livros dos Acordos’ or the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam that was transcribed, edited, and published by Maxim Kerkhof. This is the first volume, actually they are two volumes, this is the first edition of the Usque Collection. The Usque Collection also comprises of the Goana series, in which the ‘processo’ of Catarina da Orta was published and now Susana will talk a little more about this ‘Serie Goana’.
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Susana Mateus: Well, the ‘Serie Goana’ was an idea of our colleague Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, who we already met in another episode of the series, and the idea behind this series is [to give] importance to all the surviving records of the Goa Inquisition that we can find because, as you already know, the archive is destroyed so it’s pretty precious information for historians.
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So Miguel had the idea to use the surviving trials that were copied and sent to Lisbon for different kinds of reasons. So, we should make a series on the trials against New Christians and with the paleographic transcription and a critical edition of the documents and then introduction, etc. So we have the first volume the trial of Catarina da Orta and was made by Miguel, Carla, and I. Right now we are working on four other trials.
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Four pieces of inquisitorial records regarding the 16th century, so this decade, the 60s and also until the end of, more or less, until the end of the 16th century. The idea is to bring on board other scholars that work on Goa and the social context of the so-called Estado da Índia and also Asian Portuguese empire in general to produce some analytical frameworks about New Christian presence in Goa and in Asia. Let’s hope next year to have more, maybe two volumes of this collection.
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Dale Luis Menezes: That sounds great and it’s important work, especially because the archive was burnt in the 19th century, and so we have to hold on to whatever is left.
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We’ve come to the final bit of the interview. What remains is for both of you to demonstrate how an historian reads a document. So, yeah, over to you!
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Carla Vieira: Before we talk about the Inquisitorial records themselves, we find that it could be interesting to know a little more about where to find them and how they are organized in the present. In the case of the Portuguese Inquisition, the great majority of the records are concentrated in one collection, preserved in one archive, the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, the national archives in Lisbon.
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The Tribunal do Santo Ofício, the Holy Office Tribunal sources is divided into several sub-fonds, corresponding to the different tribunals operating in the Portuguese territories as well as some collections of the records of the Conselho Geral de Santo Ofício, the centralized ruling body of the Portuguese Inquisition. So, there are three sub-fonds regarding the three main Tribunals in Portugal: Lisbon, Coimbra, and Évora.
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And also three very small collections with records from three short term courts that operated in the early times of the Inquisition in Portugal: Lamego, Porto, and Tomar. Each of these collections are divided in series and sections, and the case of the Conselho Geral is divided into several series with several documents related to the [unclear] operations of this body, respondents, edicts, forms, memorials, and so on.
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The records of the Inquisition of Goa is at present held both in the Conselho Geral’s collection but also in the Inquisition of Lisbon’s collections. The trials of the Inquisition of Goa-the few trials that survived at present are in the Inquisition of Lisbon collections. So, these sub-collections of the tribunals of the Inquisition are divided into sections.
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One, with records regarding the Inquisition’s stuff, the “Ministro e oficias” or the “Inquisition officers”. And other sections, the Juizo do fisco, with records of the court for the confiscation of assets of the defendants. Then, these sub-collections are also composed of several series of documentation and one of them, the ‘processos’, the trials, the trial series, in which we will find the trials of the Inquisition.
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As you can see here, one of the good news in this this case is the fact that the Inquisitorial trials of the Inquisition of Lisbon are, almost all, are available online for consultation in the Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo database, the Digitarq.
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And now we are looking a little how to search information on these trials. We have two options to search, we can do a simple search by keywords or date range or you can do an advanced search and then searching in the structure, fields of the description of the records. For instance, we can search by reference code if you already know the reference code of the documentation of course.
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But also by title, for example, if you are looking for the Catarina da Orta trial, you will type here in this box ‘Catarina da Orta’ and then you have the results of the trials against Catarina da Orta. You can also type the date range to search and maybe the most interesting field, the scope and content. The scope and content field is not available directly in the page of advance search, you have to click on search other fields and then select the scope and content.
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And then the scope and content has the basic information about the records in the case of the trials. And it has information about the defendant and the information about the trial itself, the date of imprisonment, sentence, but also a personal information about the defendent the age, the family, the residence, so if we want to search information, we can type in the scope and content some keywords that we can find here. We should be aware that these descriptions are all in Portuguese, so we have to search with Portuguese terms not English. If you type here ‘New Christian’, or ‘Judaism’ we will have no results at all! We have to put ‘Christão Novo’ and ‘Judaismo’, for instance, here I put ‘Goa’, ‘Castelo de Vide’ and ‘Christã Nova’ or New Christian.
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So I’m looking for Catarina and then if I click in search, you will have two results, two piece of the Catarina da Orta trial here. And then, if you have more results so you can also apply some filters by date or, if you want to see records with digital presentation, or without presentation and then, if we click in the image will have access to the digital copy of the document which is great for us researchers to have this information, however, we can download the record, but only one image at the time, not all the trial, and so this is basically some tips to search information in the Aquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo about the Inquisition collection.
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Dale Luis Menezes: So, now we know how to search it but let’s find out how to read it. First we need to learn the language, and then the handwriting of course. Let me the share the screen.
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Susana Mateus: Well, in fact the first problem regarding this kind of documents is the handwriting, you need to have some kind of understanding of this, some kind of paleographic knowledge or wait until we publish all the trials, the remaining trials of the Goa Inquisition and read our books! Well…
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Dale Luis Menezes: But even if you have the published trials, the transcriptions, it’s still advisable to always look at the original documents right because there might be something. The way things are written and the way things are deleted or marginalia. All this can be important information, even if we have a transcription.
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Susana Mateus: Right, well it’s true, I have to say and this is some kind of publicity. But our colleague Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço when he conceived the Goana series, the Serie Goana, he was very strict regarding the transcription norms so in our transcription we have all these indications. You have a mention of the marginalia, also of deleted words, changed words, etc. We have to take into account in this specific case and I will mention a little bit after that we are working not with the original documents, because that one was destroyed, but with the copy made to send to Lisbon. So it’s a different document as compared to the original ones that we have for the Lisbon Inquisition, for instance.
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So here, for example, we have the first page of the Lisbon trial of Catarina da Orta, the one that Carla has mentioned before, the trial of 1547. This one is the original one, so in the middle of this trial you have the handwriting, you have the different handwritings of all the individuals involved in the trial.
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We have to take into account that we are working with the trial records so we have juridical terms, have a structure, a very strict structure that changed through time because Inquisitorial regulations also changed. In the time of Catarina da Orta we have the regulations, the first regulations of the Portuguese Inquisition of 1552 and the structure of the trial was still under construction let’s say, but, in general terms, the trial started with the denunciation to the Inquisitors.
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People denounced some religious, suspicious practices, and with this elements the inquisitors compiled all the accusations and created the first formal accusation against a person. And we have in the next image an example of the accusation that inquisitors in Lisbon made against Catarina da Orta. And basically it is well, what Carla had mentioned before, is that she performed some Jewish practice with her sister, very simple, as you can see, like two paragraphs of an accusation.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Over here is the word ‘Judaizer’ (Judaizar) and against our holy faith.
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Susana Mateus: And then the second line, you can see that she was respecting the shabbat, in Portuguese you see “guardando os sabados”. Like a Jew, “como Judia”. You have this—Well, it’s inquisitorial language, because they are formulating this kind of images of what Jewish practice was.
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Then, well this trial is a very brief one, I prefer to show the Goan trial. In the next image you have the first page of the trial and the cover of our book and hopefully we will have the book translated into English. Let’s hope next year, so it will be easy also for the broader public to have access to the trial.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Is this Catarina da Orta signature on the cover of the book?
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Susana Mateus: Yeah, that’s the problem! No, it’s signature of the person who made the copy. It’s Catarina da Orta, but as it is a copy the scribe made…
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Dale Luis Menezes: Oh OK. So he copied her signature. He kind of forged her signature. OK.
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Susana Mateus: That’s the problem we have with the remaining Goan trials. They were copies made to send to Lisbon, so you don’t have actually the diversity of handwritings of [unclear] of the different scribes, as you have in original trials, for people, for colleagues that study handwriting or things like that. They cannot do this kind of studies with this document in particular.
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So you have the formal accusation, and then you have well, the arrest, you can see, in the next image. So this is, you can see the handwriting of the scribe. It is very good one for the 16th century, I should say, and here you have the word “entregua” and it is when she was incarcerated. So, she was delivered to prison, to the prison guards.
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Below, you have the first session. So after she was arrested, she was incarcerated and then the the inquisitors made the first session, the first interrogation session. In this case of Catarina da Orta there were many sessions, because as Carla explained, there were some doubts about the declarations, there were some inconsistencies regarding the confessions of her husband.
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So you have like six, seven sessions, and then in the end of the trial she again confessed. She declined the confession, she confesses again. So it’s a very complex trial in this case. But usually, you have a number of sessions, with the interrogation sessions. In later years, you had a more structured trial record and after the arrest, after the incarceration, you have two important sessions for historians.
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The first one is the ‘inventario’ or inventory, so you have a list, a declaration of the assets that the person had. And this is very important also for studies on cultural history or material history and aspects of daily life also.
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And then you have another important session, that is the genealogy session where the prisoner will declare all family connections and that can be very useful for us in order to try and to place a person in a network, in a familial network, commercial network, etc.
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So you have, as I said, a lot of interrogations and then after this formal accusations are built…
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Dale Luis Menezes: So just before we go ahead, what is the word that you’ve circled over here in green?
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Susana Mateus: You have a number 1 and then ‘Sessão’, session.
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Dale Luis Menezes: OK.
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Susana Mateus: So, who the copy is identifying the different parts of the trial, this one is the first moment where Catarina for the first time is dealing with the questions of the Inquisitors.
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Then you have a possibility of some kind of defense. Here is another important piece of the trial where the defendant and the ‘attorney’ of the defendant can present some witnesses of defense, also some arguments of defense. We can see the word ‘Contrariando’ the term is “Contradiction” because it’s like a contradictory moment so where she is trying to prove that the accusations are false and why they are false. So it’s this kind of moment.
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The inquisitors if they had some doubts about the veracity of the confessions or if the defendant remains without making a, what they call the true confession, they can use sometimes torture trying to have more easy confession.
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After all these moments we have the first publication of the sentence, you can see that in the next image, this is the list of the defense witnesses. You can see here…
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Dale Luis Menezes: What does it say over here?
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Susana Mateus: It says, “Testamunhas para a defesa atras” so she made that argumentation in her defense and she is presenting a list of witnesses that can certify the argument she presented.
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And now we arrived at the moment where the Inquisitors present the first, what they call the first publication of the sentence. So, they are saying, your trial is in this stage, and right now, as you can see here very difficult to see is “Primeira publicação” or “The First publication”. So it’s like a menace in a way because they are saying with the confession you made, with the doubts we have this is the sentence we are proposing. Usually it’s death sentence, because they are trying to show the defendant that if he or she does not confess fully she is at risk of dying. Or be condemned to death.
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Dale Luis Menezes: So this this would be published as in announced outside in the city square or something like that?
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Susana Mateus: Yes, but in reality it is internally, because they are in fact reading the sentence to the defendants.
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Dale Luis Menezes: So, that’s it. That’s what “Publicação” means?
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Susana Mateus: They are not making a public statement. They are making a publication for the defendant, they are reading it to her, in the case of Catarina. You see this is your sentence, you will be condemned like this for the crimes you have committed, etc. Then…
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Dale Luis Menezes: Why is everything so densely packed? Because it’s a copy or the original trial would have more paper, is basically what am I asking?
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Susana Mateus: The original trial would have much more paper and more space between different sessions, different moments, different handwritings. This one is a copy so he [the scribe] is making it very narrow.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Very tightly packed.
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Susana Mateus: And afterwards they make an identification of the different pieces in order to read it better, so, in fact, this kind of identification is made afterwards. For us it is good, because you can easily, more or less easily, identify…
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Dale Luis Menezes: Oh OK, so the bookmarks are kind of added later just to separate sections of the process.
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Susana Mateus: Yeah because as we can see it’s all very dense, the handwriting is very dense.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Right. Should I go to the next slide?
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Susana Mateus: Yes, well then, we have, maybe we will have more confessions until we arrive at the final sentence and what we have here is the final sentence of Catarina da Orta and also, you have the mark is an abbreviation of the Portuguese word, “sentença”.
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Dale Luis Menezes: This one.
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Susana Mateus: And, and this one is the final one, so you have the conclusion of the trial. In the case of Catarina’s, as we already mentioned, she was sentenced to death, and we have it here.
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In the next slide. Here is the term of execution moment so they are saying that she was sent to the Auto da Fé. And she was delivered to the secular ‘hand’ or “braço secular” as was the term that the Inquisition used to express the final sentence.
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And so, if it was the case that Catarina wasn’t condemned to death, as in the first trial, for example, the trial of Lisbon, she would be condemned to perform other penances, for instance, spiritual penances, wearing the penitential garments, or to make public abjurations of her famous errors, it would be a different conclusion of the trial, in this case the conclusion is this one.
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Dale Luis Menezes: Right. Thank you so much for reading the document for us and it was fascinating to see how not just historians in general work but since you had worked on the trial, how you worked and how you read the documents. So thank you again for that.
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We are we at the end of the episode and very quickly we went through the life of Catarina da Orta and how she was tried, we spoke about the New Christians, who they will, how they were identified, how historians think about them, then in a related way we also spoke about the crypto-Jews and we’ve already spoken about them and the problems with the term at length earlier, so I won’t repeat it again and finally we’ve just seen how historians read a document, a very technical document, a legal document here, of the trial of Catarina da Orta.
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So, before we end I would like to once again thank all our guests: Bruno Feitler, Ângela Barreto Xavier, Ana Cannas da Cunha, José Pedro Paiva, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Celia Tavares, Patricia Souza da Faria and, last but not the least, our guests for today Susana Bastos Matheus and Carla Costa Vieira.
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You all gave your valuable time and inputs and in doing so have enriched us intellectually, and on a personal note, it is always a pleasure to read documents with fellow historians, so Carla, Susana thank you very much!
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Carla Vieira: Thank you, Dale.
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Dale Luis Menezes: And, on behalf of the Al-Zulaij Collective I thank the Sephardic Study Center, the Catholic University of Portugal and the History of the Inquisitions Research Group for your moral support.
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And, finally, to all our viewers, it’s been quite a long journey, so thank you, muito obrigado, ani Dev borem korum!
