Chapter Three

THE KING’S ESSENTIAL HERETICS

When the bad news from Jamaica reached Spain, Charles V, the Lord of Half the World, was not surprised. It seemed that every time he put his crown on in 1534, there was trouble in his kingdom. Even his vaunted title, Holy Roman Emperor, didn’t carry the same weight as it had when his grandfather Maximilian wore the crown. So when he read that most of his Jamaican colonists were dead and the rest wanted out, Charles was not unduly grieved. He had seen it coming.

In the nineteen years that he had been ruling the New World, Jamaica had always been more of a problem than the “fairest isle” Columbus thought it to be. New Seville of Gold was now known simply as New Seville. The anticipated flow of the precious metal turned out to be a trickle, and most of the sixty thousand Indians who had greeted Columbus were dead. Aside from a small productive settlement of conversos on the south coast, the colony was going under. Why remain in Jamaica when neighboring Hispaniola and Cuba offered a regal style of life said to rival that of Spain? Why settle Jamaica when the nearby Main offered the promise of Aztec and Inca gold?

The communiqué was desperate: Conditions at New Seville had “turned out so badly that no citizen has prospered nor kept his health for a day.” To salvage the colony, his treasurer Pedro de Manzuelo proposed removing the settlement “to the south side of the island where the land is plentiful in bread and beef…with very good ports suitable for navigation to the provinces of Santa Marta, Cartagena, and the mainland…There is great disposition to settle there because no ship in this trade comes to the north coast but all load on the south.”1

Manzuelo concluded his report with a seemingly odd request. To pioneer the south coast settlement, he recommended the king send an additional thirty Portuguese families to join with the twenty already there. Together they would be put to work on his sugar estate. Manzuelo’s request was couched in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. The king had made growing sugarcane in the Indies a priority and had been subsidizing planters in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Mexico with land grants, duty waivers, and loans. Years earlier, Jamaica’s sugar mill in New Seville had shown the island’s potential for growing the sweetener, and it made sense to recruit more workers to increase the island’s production.2 But why Portuguese? Portugal was then attracting settlers to its colonies with the promise of riches, so where would the king find Portuguese families in his realm willing to settle a poor Spanish island?

The fact is, he didn’t have to. Manzuelo’s directive was aimed at enlisting neither sugar workers nor Portuguese natives. In Crown correspondence, reference to Portuguese residing in Spanish lands pertained not to national origin, but rather was a code word for the worst heretics in his kingdom. With the stability of his empire at stake, Charles V took seriously his vows as Chief Knight of the Holy Inquisition to convert the heathen and burn the heretic. Yet when the communiqué specified “Portuguese,” Charles read between the lines: Jamaica for the Jews, or the colony goes under.3

When Columbus returned from his voyage of discovery, a golden thread had wound its way into the fabric of every Spaniard’s imagination. In time it stretched from the New World across the Ocean Sea to a peninsula on the edge of the Old World, where it wove an exotic pattern of desire stirring a man’s dreams. Wherever men gathered, the talk was the same—tales of opulent cities with riches beyond belief and beautiful naked maidens aching to please.

Jamaica, thought to have neither, had become a dead end. Only Puerto Rico, where man-eating Indians discouraged settlement, was less popular. Why settle Jamaica when the bounty of the New World was thought to be yours for the taking, if a man be but brave and bold enough? And what Spaniard wasn’t? In their own generation, they had defeated the Moors, kicked out the Jews, enslaved the Indians, and conquered more territory than Rome had in five centuries. In forty-two years, their country had swelled from an alliance of Christians fighting over a few thousand square miles to a world empire governing millions. In the process, Spain had become the richest, most powerful nation on earth. Their king and Church told them they had the right, and they had proved they had the might.

Romance novels of chivalry, the pulp fiction of the day, “fired the imaginations of conquistadors to seek their own adventures in the New World. Their heads filled with fantastic notions…their courage spurred by noble examples of the great heroes of chivalry, they were prepared to undergo every kind of hardship and sacrifice as they penetrated through swamps and jungles into the new continent.”4 Fortune seekers from every province of Spain filled the taverns of Santo Domingo, the capital of the New World, plotting, conspiring, and gambling on destinies. Most, like Cortés, were soldiers of fortune, a class of Spaniard that had evolved during the Reconquista—the seven centuries of warfare against the Moors. In a grasp at nobility, they called themselves hidalgos, meaning sons of somebody, but the true somebodies, the grandees, would wait another fifty years before sending their sons to the New World. Provided you wore the cross of Jesus, your origin didn’t matter: an acrobat and a musician had looted Colombia for gold; a former scribe got the pearls of Venezuela; a soldier of fortune ruling New Spain, a nation bigger than Europe, was said to be richer than the king himself. And in the summer of 1534, word spread through Spain that a pig farmer turned conquistador had plundered an Indian nation of limitless gold.


While Charles was mulling the Jamaican communiqué in the royal palace, the pig farmer’s brother, Hernando Pizarro, was thrilling court attendees with the tale of how his illiterate brother Francisco, taking a cue from Cortés, had passed himself off as a god, kidnapped the Inca chief, and after accumulating a ransom of nineteen tons of gold and silver, had strangled and then burned the heretic. Even as Hernando spoke of this maleficent deed, a rumor spread in the court: A fleet of seventy ships from the New World had arrived at the Spanish port of Laredo with ten thousand Amazon women on board, hungry for Spanish men to father their children. Given the lure of Inca gold and the lust for Amazon women, Charles knew that would-be settlers would line up for Peru.5 But none would be interested in settling Jamaica, except the Jews. Along with an empire, Charles had inherited the Inquisition, and soon found the threat of being burned alive a handy means to control false conversos.

While tons of New World gold poured into Charles’s treasury each year, it leaked out just as fast, and in the summer of 1534 he would need every ounce to defend his borders.6 His empire was under attack. Jacob Fugger, the German banker who had loaned him a half million ducats to bribe the electors to name him Holy Roman Emperor, had died, and the Fuggers refused to advance him any more coin.7 It was one thing for a pig herder to capture a New World empire and gather its riches; it was quite another to ensure their safe transfer to the Crown to fund his extravagances, fill his nobles’ pockets, and pay for soldiers to fight his enemies.

The New World was his golden goose. If Jews were best suited to care for the golden egg, then he would send them to the New World and get on with more pressing matters of state. France’s King Francis I and the Ottoman emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent, his two challengers for world dominance, were allied against him. Francis was backing border raids into Italy; Suleiman’s cavalry of 100,000 horsemen was camped on the eastern shore of the Danube rattling their sabers, while in the Mediterranean the sultan’s naval commander, Barbarossa, was on his way to attack Tunis, Charles’s last stronghold in North Africa.

There was also the enemy within, walking around in a monk’s habit spreading heresy. That summer three German princes rejected the True Faith and declared for Martin Luther, who was turning all of northern Europe into heretics. Charles hated Luther and would have smiled to see him roasted by the Inquisition, but he needed the princes’ help to defend his empire from the hordes of Suleiman. So he swallowed his anger, abided their heresy, and received their support.

The survival of Jamaica, in the midst of the Caribbean trading lanes, was essential to the security of the treasure ships that passed offshore, carrying the New World’s riches back to Spain. If it meant dealing with converted Jews to ensure their safety and prevent the strategic colony from becoming a pirate base, so be it. In 1522, three treasure-laden ships dispatched to him from Mexico by Cortés had been captured and diverted to France by an Italian pirate better known today for the bridge bearing his name as the discoverer of New York harbor—Verrazano. The Aztec plunder the Italian delivered to the royal court in Paris included a half ton of gold, 682 pounds of pearls, jewel boxes encrusted with topaz, mirrors of polished obsidian, an emerald as large as a man’s fist, three live jaguars—and of even greater value, the sea charts of the captured Spanish pilots.8

When Charles demanded that Francis return the loot, the French king spoke for Europe’s other rulers when he mockingly told him: “The sun shines on me just the same as on you, and I would like to see the clause in Adam’s will that bars me from my share of the riches of the New World!” With these words, state-licensed piracy, known as privateering, commenced in the Caribbean and became the clarion call of sea rovers.9

Given the threats to his empire, Charles was “quick to temper” when June 1534 passed and his treasure ships, due in May, hadn’t arrived. Finally, in early July, the galleons landed at Cádiz and off-loaded 21 million pesos’ worth of silver. When informed, Charles “danced a wild jig around with his son Philip and dwarf jester Perico.” When Perico said to the eight-year-old prince, “Your father is Lord of Half the World; soon you will be Lord of All,” it was said that Charles, who rarely let loose, “laff with no end.”10

It was then that Charles, having received the communiqué that his Jamaica colony was foundering, agreed to send the “Portugals.” Although he may have suspected the converted Jews of heresy, Charles knew that he could count on them to conduct the necessary business of managing his empire.

The conversos of 1492 were initially welcomed into a society desperate to fill those positions in which the Jews of Spain had specialized. As New Christians, they quickly became an elite bourgeoisie of merchants, physicians, tax collectors, mapmakers, financiers, and advisers to the crown. But the rapidity of their success stirred emotions that only the flames of the Inquisition would calm. In 1534, even as their baptized children filled important commercial positions in an expanding empire and in the councils of her church, the Limpieza de Sangre (Pure Blood) law introduced to Santo Domingo in 1525 decreed the New World off-limits to all but Old Christians able to trace their ancestry back four generations.11 Whether one was a recent converso or a New Christian from 1391, a drop of Jewish blood rendered one unfit to forward God’s glory in Spain’s empire. The law barred New Christians from a growing list of professions, and even parts of Spain. To discourage escape, conversos were not permitted to sell their land or exchange promissory notes or bills of exchange.

Like his grandfather Ferdinand, Charles adhered to the principle that the end justifies the means. He therefore had no qualms about using conversos to salvage his Jamaican colony. Although he saw himself as a soldier for God, he did not let religious posturing stand in the way of self-interest. He financed wars in Europe by borrowing from anyone he could, sold futures in the gold ships to foreign bankers, pawned the Molucca islands to the king of Portugal, leased Venezuela and Chile to German bankers who hoped to discover El Dorado, and the following year (1535), courted Doña Gracia Méndez Nasi, a famous Jewess, for a sizeable loan from her Portuguese bank.


In Charles’s lifetime, his subjects explored and settled a world three times as big as the one into which he had been born, and he needed help, even if it meant dealing with suspect heretics. They would help him maintain his empire in ways no one else could. Throughout his reign, Charles needed, but never trusted, them. He was used to dealing with nobles and clergy, but the Jews were something else. The People of the Book had the arrogance of royalty and valued themselves not by physical prowess or even riches, but by knowledge, wisdom, and business acumen. They were his essential heretics, efficient pawns in his global chess game, to be moved about and sacrificed at will.

Included in the Royal Fifth Pizarro brought the king was a small gold box belonging to Atahualpa, the Inca chieftain, for the cocoa leaves that he and his subjects chewed for energy. Charles kept it for his snuff and may have been toying with it as he took time out from conquering the New World to ponder the problems of administering it. The king was known for his silent reflections—he often stared into the air, his clear blue eyes focused on some unknown object, while his mouth lay open (due to the protruding lower jaw characteristic of the Hapsburg line)—and one imagines him turning to Francisco Cobos, his hovering counselor, and saying in his constrained and measured way of talking: “Send for Acosta [the court Jew]; we require new settlers bound for Jamaica.”

Arriving at Port Esquivel in October, the new settlers were welcomed by the twenty “Portuguese” families already there. Today, these fifty Jewish families are credited with founding Villa de la Vega (Town by the Fertile Plain), Jamaica’s capital for more than three centuries. Now called Spanish Town, La Vega, founded in 1534, represents the earliest documented settlement of converted Jews in the New World.12

Charles turned his attention next to the heathens at his door: Sultan Suleiman’s army, having overrun Persia and occupied Hungary, was on the move, and in the Mediterranean, Barbarossa’s armada of eighty-four ships had embarked from Constantinople to sweep Spanish power from the sea.13

The sultan’s naval commander, Khair-ed-Din, known to Christians as Barbarossa for his flaming red beard, was a terror in the Mediterranean even before he joined with Suleiman. The son of an unknown Greek father and a renegade Christian mother, he earned his infamy for his treatment of Christian prisoners: He tortured the men, while keeping the most comely women for his harem.

The sultan, having no navy, had left the sea’s defense to Barbarossa and ex-Iberian Moors who had crossed over to North Africa after their defeat at Granada, and were joined by a second wave in 1525 when Charles ordered all who remained to convert to Christianity. Made furious by their forced exile, they made up the bulk of Barbarossa’s crew. Barbarossa himself claimed to have ferried over seventy thousand Mudejares (Spanish Moors who stayed faithful to Islam). Returning to a region whence their ancestors came, they were welcomed by the region’s Turkish overlords, who also followed the ways of Mohammed.

The North Africa shore, known as the Barbary Coast, was likewise familiar to Iberian Jews, whose forebears had settled there in the first century after Rome’s legions conquered Jerusalem and dispersed upward of fifty thousand Jews to Spain and ports around the Mediterranean. The displaced citizens of Judea took to the sea, becoming the region’s major shipowners, merchants, and traders. Fifteen hundred years later, when the Sephardic exiles arrived in North Africa, they were consigned special quarters by their Muslim hosts. Together, the two exiled immigrant groups forged a formidable force.

Positioned to wreak vengeance on those who labeled them infidels and heretics, they partnered in the region’s most profitable industry—piracy. Sephardic merchants financed the Moors’ devastating raids on the coastal towns of Spain and Italy and shared the booty—spices from the East and Christian slaves from Europe. Setting forth in swift, multi-oared galleys from Algiers and other seaside bases, the Barbary pirates (known as corsairs) sacked and burned villages and carried off men, women, and children.14 If not ransomed, the males were stripped, chained naked to the oars, and forced to row until they died of fatigue; the women were sent to harems; and the children were raised as Muslims.

That July, Pope Clement, a Florentine Medici more concerned with his family’s interests than supporting Charles’s religious bent, delivered a blow against the Defender of the True Faith when, on his deathbed, he pardoned conversos for past offenses. This did not sit well with Charles. He and the pope had gotten along only when mutual self-interest demanded.15 Now that it did not, Clement’s decision to free up those masters of commerce threatened to turn the Mediterranean in matters of trade into a Jewish sea. If they were unchecked, Charles would be forced to deal with that deceitful race. Under the sultan’s suzerainty, the Jews had turned Turkey’s Constantinople and Greece’s Salonika into the sea’s richest ports, and via links with their brethren around the Mediterranean had developed new, lucrative trade routes to the East.

Although incensed by the prospect, Charles withheld action—figuring that, with Clement dying, he could throw his support to a new pope who would reverse the pardon. But a month later, he received devastating news he could not abide: a Jewish pirate had conquered Tunis, his last stronghold in North Africa.


SINAN, “THE FAMOUS JEWISH PIRATE”

While Barbarossa’s name was feared throughout Christendom, he was not really a naval commander or even much of a sailor. Instead he occupied himself with building his navy and plotting its moves, and left most of the sea battles to his favored captain, Sinan, a Jewish refugee from Spain via Turkey.16

On August 20, 1534, Sinan, commonly known as “the Great Jew” or “the Famous Jewish Pirate,”17 led a hundred ships into the harbor and occupied the North African city of Tunis—hitherto a possession of Spain—on behalf of Suleiman. The strategic port was situated across from Sicily astride a narrow strait linking the eastern and western Mediterranean basins. Suleiman, who ruled the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean, had established a presence in the western basin when Barbarossa conquered Algiers in 1529. Now, with the crescent flag flying over Tunis, he held dominion over the entire Mediterranean. No longer could Charles’s ships venture safely beyond home waters; instead the Mediterranean had become an alien sea dominated by Muslim corsairs and Jewish merchants.

Charles’s first reaction showed that his religious fealty took a backseat to realpolitik. Not without some holy guilt, he dispatched an agent to Tunis to offer Barbarossa “the lordship of North Africa” to come over to his side. Failing that, he instructed that the agent was to poison or cut the pirate’s throat in the evening, when he was known to be in his cups. But evening never came. Punctuating his rejection of Charles’s offer with a swing of his curved scimitar, Barbarossa decapitated the agent.

Charles saw the mission’s failure as divinely ordained. Over the next year, obsessed with the idea of a crusade to reconquer Tunis, he secretly assembled an armada of four hundred ships and an army of thirty thousand from all parts of his empire.*2 He himself would lead the hosts of Christendom to strike a decisive blow against the infidel. Tunis would be his holy crusade to show the world he was its righteous ruler.18



On June 10, 1535, as the imperial fleet was about to embark, Charles addressed the assembled nobles. Unfurling a banner of the crucified Christ, he pointed to the savior, exclaiming: “He is your captain-general! I am but his standard-bearer.”19 Five days later, the fleet anchored at the entrance to the captured port.

Having known of Charles’s intentions, Barbarossa likewise preached a holy war, and recruited several thousand mujahideen (Muslim warriors) to battle the crusaders. With spies keeping him current, Barbarossa fortified the fort at the entrance to the port, named La Goletta (the throat) because “it held Tunis by the throat.” Barbarossa had assigned its defense to Sinan and five thousand of his best men.

On June 15, 1535, the cannons of seventy ships bombarded the fort’s twin towers. For twenty-four days, Sinan and the defenders held out. Three times Sinan sallied forth to engage the attackers, but the odds were overwhelming and his sorties were repulsed. Finally, the fortress walls were breached by the relentless pounding of forty-pound iron balls fired from the Knights of Malta’s eight-decked galleon, the largest fighting vessel then in existence. Spanish, German, and Italian forces poured into the fort. Sinan, forced to evacuate, crossed the bay to the city with the remnant of his men. With the fort’s capture, Charles had seized control of the bay and with it Barbarossa’s eighty-seven galleys.

Barbarossa knew he was beaten, but was still determined to give the Christians a blow they would not soon forget. The next day, as Charles gathered his army for a final assault, an enraged Barbarossa told Sinan he had decided to slaughter the twenty thousand Christian slaves packed in the city’s underground dungeons. Sinan dissuaded him: “To stain ourselves with so awful a massacre,” he told his commander, “would place us outside the pale of humanity forever.”20 Human compassion aside, it made no sense to destroy one’s property before the battle was joined. Besides, he added, slaughtering so many prisoners would take too much time. His logic was persuasive, but as things turned out, sparing their lives proved the defenders’ undoing. Defecting Moors, looking to curry favor if the Spanish assault succeeded, freed the prisoners. Once released, the slaves raided the city arsenal, overpowered the guards, and threw open the gates.

Charles’s forces stormed in. For a day the battle raged. Charles, on a gallop around the city, had his horse shot from under him. Charles, known for his courage and cool composure, smiled when his men entreated him to take shelter from the barrage of bullets, and said: “An Emperor was never yet known to be shot.”21 So it was with Barbarossa, who reportedly killed dozens of men “with the keen blade of his scimitar.” But the issue was never in doubt. Sensing that all was lost, Sinan and Barbarossa mounted their camels and, with four thousand men, escaped to the desert to fight another day.

On July 21, Charles’s victorious army swept through the city. For three days, his righteous crusaders looted Tunis and massacred its citizens. An estimated seventy thousand people were killed and forty thousand taken captive. The carnage was called the worst of the century by Catholic chroniclers who wrote of the shameful affair, for the victims were not Barbarossa’s men but the innocent people of Tunis who a year before had been the Christians’ allies. Only when the crusaders and freed Christian slaves began killing one another in a fight over the spoils did the assault end. Jews were not exempted from this bloodshed of murder and looting. As one noted, “The Jews had no savior on the day of the Lord’s wrath.” Those not “smitten with the edge of the sword when the uncircumcised came to the city” were taken captive and held for ransom, while those who escaped into the desert were left destitute when the Muslims “plundered everything they brought with them.”22

To memorialize his victory, Charles had brought along a poet and historian to record his victory, and a court painter whose mural of Sinan’s force unsuccessfully counterattacking was made into a tapestry that hangs today in a Vienna museum.

On their return home, the twenty thousand rescued Christians sang their emperor’s praise, hailing him as the knight-errant who had vanquished the scourge of Christendom. His reputation as defender of the faith was enhanced when the new pope approved his demand that an Inquisition commence in Portugal. Charles had been pushing for this, though not for any sanctimonious religious reason. Rather, the conversos in Portugal had accumulated wealth that Spanish conversos had transferred to them for safekeeping, thereby bleeding Spain’s riches. To rein in the conversos’ power, he called on Portugal’s King John to threaten them with the holy fire. The concerted action of the two monarchs brought about a further exodus of conversos from both nations.

King John went along with Charles, but did so reluctantly. Though the two were close—John’s sister Isabella was happily wed to Charles—Portugal’s king could ill afford to bar these talented people from his empire. He sought their advice for most endeavors he undertook; moreover, he was heavily in debt. Conversos had loaned him 500,000 ducats and he knew they were good for more. Just as Spain’s New Christians rose to influential positions denied them as Jews, so too had Portugal’s Jews. From the time they were forcibly converted in 1497, as New Christians they had married into the best families and filled the highest offices of state. Portugal’s nearly 100,000 conversos represented 10 percent of King John’s citizenry. Despite their elevated status, the general populace did not trust them. Having rejected conversion in Spain, it was not likely that a forced baptism had truly altered their beliefs. From infidels outside the church they were now seen as heretics within.

By the mid-1530s, Charles had come around to the view that while many Spanish conversos only pretended to be Christian, they were neither numerous nor powerful enough to threaten him. He appreciated their ability to stimulate commerce and thereby increase the cash flow to his treasury, which by March 1536 was nearly empty. His adviser Corbos cautioned him that he was “on the verge of bankruptcy.”23 Thus, in line with his laissez-faire attitude to their presence both in Jamaica and elsewhere in the New World, he directed the magistrates of Antwerp, northern Europe’s trading capital, to grant Spanish conversos full settlement rights, and solved the problem of Jamaica by giving the island away.

Although little is known about the Portugals Charles sent to Jamaica, apparently there was trouble right away, because at the same time Charles was recruiting his crusading army, he hurriedly dispatched an abbot to the island to keep an eye on religious matters. In March 1535, Father Amador de Samano arrived in Jamaica. He had gone ahead on the king’s orders before being accredited by the pope. Unable to produce papers from Rome, he was not recognized by Jamaica’s governor, who “used many disrespectful words unto him and other things worthy of censure and punishment.” When Charles was notified that his governor had acted “in disservice of God and in disrespect of our royal decrees,” he ordered him to “purge his offence before the Royal Audiencia*3 in Santo Domingo.”24

For Charles, Jamaica’s rejection of his abbot was a final straw. Years before, he had allocated money for a Jamaican church that was still being built and a hospital that never was. He received samples of gold ore, but not much more. His two haciendas and their livestock were valued at five thousand pesos, and though he also had two sugar mills, the only profit he made was selling produce to the starving settlers. Even then he had to loan them money to buy the goods, and if they didn’t pay, threaten to sell the produce to his other colonies.

Jamaica was a losing proposition, and the governors he sent there were no better. Each accused his predecessor of diverting funds and selling off the king’s acreage “as their own private property.” It had been ten years since a plague of smallpox wiped out most of Jamaica’s Indians and the island’s more ambitious settlers left to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The allure to leave in 1536 was even more compelling as word spread that the search for El Dorado was on, with three conquistadors climbing over mountains in a competitive race to find the haunt of “the Golden One,” the Indian king bathed in gold dust. Between the island’s Portuguese, whom he needed but didn’t trust, and the lazy Spaniards who remained, Charles was convinced that he wasn’t going to realize much of a profit from Jamaica. The island, he concluded, would be good only as a trading post, a way station for ships en route to and from the New World.

The answer he settled on was to deed Jamaica to the Columbus kin. Since the summer of 1536, Charles had been negotiating with Diego Colón’s widow, María de Toledo, to settle a lawsuit she brought to recover Columbus’s rights of discovery on behalf of his grandson, her eight-year-old son, Luis Colón. In January 1537, she agreed to drop the suit in return for Jamaica. Charles did not question why Doña María wanted Jamaica; he was glad to get rid of it. But when he drafted the agreement to relinquish the troubled colony, she rejected it because it did not include power over the Church.

After a month’s stalemate he reluctantly gave in.25 This provision—subordinating the Jamaican church to the Columbus family—was unprecedented. For the next century, the family kept Jamaica, alone in the Spanish Empire, out of bounds to the Inquisition. Doña Maria’s decision was critical to the Portugals with whom she worked closely to develop the island’s trade. Like the court Jews who counseled Columbus on the issue of hereditary rights, Jamaica’s Portugals would have encouraged her to hold firm to this demand.

Unfortunately, the absence of an Inquisition in Jamaica also means there is almost a complete absence of information about these Portugals who opted for New World adventure over Old World connections. While most conversos fled east or settled around the Mediterranean, these Portugals chose Jamaica, an island in a new sea. Rather than reside in restrictive exile communities under the watchful eye of another ruler, they opted for the unknown. In these peak years of discovery and conquest, they looked to a New World where each man could be his own ruler and had the same hot blood for adventure that surged through all who came.

In February 1537, Charles formally ceded Jamaica to the Columbus family.26 It would still be a part of the Spanish realm and the family could not erect forts without Crown permission or pursue an independent foreign policy. Except for these stipulations, Jamaica, and “all the mines of gold” therein, were now the personal estate of the Columbus family whose heirs would bear the title Marquis de la Vega.*4 After the matter was settled, Pedro de Manzuelo, royal treasurer of Jamaica, wrote the king. He had “heard that His majesty had bestowed the island of Jamaica on the Admiral” and cautioned:


This will be a loss to the Crown because Jamaica is another Sicily in Italy, for it provides all the neighboring countries as well as the Main and New Spain and is the centre of them all. If times should change…whoever is Lord of Jamaica will be Lord of these places on account of its situation…His Majesty should on no account part with it.27


Over time, the remaining Spanish colonists in New Seville joined the Portugals in La Vega. However, with ownership vested in the discoverer’s family, few Spaniards were interested in settling what came to be called Columbus’s island. Those already there were mostly ranchers, raising horses, cattle, and pigs. By midcentury, their power was at a low point, while the Portugals, who were mostly engaged in trade, prospered, in part by supplying passing conquistadors with horses and provisions.

Although the hidalgos were often in conflict with the Portugals, a century would pass before accusations of Judaizing surfaced. Apparently they maintained a Christian façade, attended church, and had their children baptized. Probably they adhered to some of the same practices as the secret Jews in Mexico and other Spanish colonies, who gathered in secret on certain nights to read from the Torah. They fasted twice a week for their apostasy, adored Purim’s Queen Esther as a covert Jew like themselves, and viewed Haman as the Grand Inquisitor.

Meanwhile, back in the Mediterranean, Charles’s nemesis Sinan, who never hid behind a Christian mask, continued the marauding that would seal Suleiman’s power in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1538, the Jewish corsair destroyed most of Spain’s naval fleet off the port of Preveza in Greece, and the following year he blockaded the Gulf of Cattaro on the Dalmatian coast and forced the surrender of the last Spanish garrison. These defeats for Charles, coupled with the death in childbirth in 1539 of his beloved wife, Isabella, plunged the emperor into a despair that was only dispelled by aggressive action against false conversos and planning a renewed war against the infidel.

Charles’s motive when he allowed Spain’s conversos to settle in Antwerp in 1536 was purely mercenary. What they believed didn’t concern him. But this attitude changed when King John followed suit, and soon Portugal’s conversos were outperforming those from Spain in the burgeoning East Indian spice trade, netting Portugal’s king nearly a million ducats a year.28 Accordingly, Charles reversed the policy. Knowing that Portugal’s Jews, having been forcibly converted, were more likely to Judaize, in 1540 he ordered Antwerp’s bailiff “to proceed with utmost severity” against suspect conversos.29

Charles next turned his attention to capturing Algiers, the Ottoman outpost closest to Spain. As he had taken Tunis, so he would conquer the sultan’s primary stronghold in his sector of the Mediterranean. In the fall of 1541, Charles advanced on Algiers with a force of fifty warships, two hundred support vessels, and an army of nearly twenty thousand. As the port was lightly defended by a garrison of four thousand men, he had good reason to be confident.

But on the night of October 23, as his army was disembarking on a beach near Algiers, thunderous black clouds out of the northeast darkened the landing site and burst upon them. For three days, an unceasing storm and gale-force winds wracked the invaders. Fourteen warships were dashed against the rocks and a hundred transport vessels destroyed, with the loss of eight thousand men. Those who made it ashore were stuck in a muddy quagmire. At the end of the tempest, Moorish horsemen charged down from the hills, their swords flaying the imperial troops. Charles, soaked to the skin, with sword in hand, tried to rally his men, but considering the situation, ordered his army to re-embark. When the fleet regrouped fifteen miles down the coast, the conqueror of Mexico, Hernando Cortés, whom Charles had invited along, advised a counterattack. But the emperor, his troops dispirited, exhausted, and ill-equipped, reluctantly ended the expedition, blaming its failure on the weather. During the invasion, the two thousand Jews of Algiers, knowing the fate that had befallen their brethren in Tunis, lived in great fear. Afterward, in commemoration of the three days when the heavens opened up in their defense, they instituted a special holiday with three days of fasting and celebration.30

In 1544, a year after his Algiers disaster, Charles left Spain for Flanders and did not return until 1556. As Charles departed in sadness, Sinan rejoiced. The Jewish corsair was at the Red Sea port of Suez that year, building a fleet to support an Indian prince’s effort to evict the Portuguese, when he got word that Barbarossa had rescued Sinan’s kidnapped son. Five years before, the boy had been taken by imperial forces on his way to rejoin his father after Sinan’s latest victory. He was eventually delivered to the Lord of Elba, who baptized the child and raised him at court. Several times Barbarossa tried to ransom the boy without success. Finally in 1544, when sailing near Elba, he sent an envoy to bargain for the youth’s return, only to be told that the ruler’s “religious scruples forbade him to surrender a baptized Christian to an infidel.” A furious Barbarossa landed his men, sacked the town of Piombino, and blew up the fort. At this point the Lord of Elba agreed to surrender his “boy-favorite.”31

In 1551, after a stint as governor of Algiers, Sinan, now Kaptan Pasha, commander of the Turkish navy, captured Tripoli. Occupying the port, he imprisoned the Knights of Malta, who had moved there from their island. After first hauling them back to Constantinople and parading them in chains before the sultan, Sinan—gracious in victory in contrast to Charles’s crusaders at Tunis—set the humbled knights free.

In May 1553, in his final recorded action, Sinan sailed down the Dardanelles from Gallipoli with 150 ships, including twenty French galleys, and ravaged the coastal districts of southern Italy and Sicily. Before returning to Constantinople, he landed on Corsica at the behest of the king of France and expelled the Genoese. That is the last we hear of “the famous Jewish pirate,” noted for his humane treatment of prisoners and his magical powers. His untutored crew bragged that he needed no more than a crossbow to find the height of the stars to determine their position at sea. (In truth, his crossbow was a “Jacob’s staff,” an early form of sextant.)

Charles’s final years were not as fortunate. In 1556, the pressures of the job drove him to abdicate in favor of his son Philip II, give half his empire to his brother Ferdinand, and retire to a monastery.32 The Venetian ambassador wrote that he was “not greedy of territory, but most greedy of peace and quiet.”33 Yet war was his constant affair and he was utterly worn out by it. In the company of monks, the emperor spent the last two years of his life fishing for trout from a tower window over a rushing stream and trying to synchronize his sizeable collection of 159 clocks. He is said to have exclaimed after giving up in vain: “How foolish I have been to think I could make all men believe alike about religion or unite all my dominions when I cannot even make these clocks strike the hour together?”34

In September 1558, after a long illness and tormented by the gout that left him an invalid, Charles cried, “Oh Lord, I go,” and died. Sinan, who had always been a thorn in his side, also died that year. His tombstone at Istanbul’s Scutari cemetery reads in part:


Towards his friends, Sinan was another Joseph; his enemies dreaded him like a dart. Let us pray to Heaven for Sinan; may God cause his soul to rejoice…The Kaptan Pasha has entered the realm of Divine Mercy.35


An assessment of Charles’s reign has to conclude that he overreached and overspent. The empire was too big, his enemies and the forces against him too powerful. The tides of history were not in his favor. Spain had stopped producing. Relying on gold and silver from the New World to import most everything doubled the prices of goods. Europe thereby profited, while Spain’s treasury by the time he abdicated was 20 million ducats in debt.

Moreover, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German in 1534 proved a capstone to Protestants. Although they would be fiercely opposed by the Society of Jesus, founded that same year, whose members saw themselves as soldiers of God and whose Counter-Reformation was supported by Charles, there was no stopping the heretical sect that spread like plague through his empire. Even Charles’s vaunted prestige as conqueror of Tunis dissipated when the son of his vassal there dethroned (and blinded) his father and thereafter favored the Turks; at La Goletta as well, his Spanish commander wound up renouncing his faith and became a Muslim.

Charles could not hold back the winds of change. He resented that his enemies made a point of aiding and abetting Sephardim, whom he saw as his heretics. By midcentury, France’s new king, Henry II, allowed “Portuguese merchants” known as “New Christians” to settle at Bordeaux and Bayonne, two ports on the Atlantic just north of Spain enriched by peninsula trade, while in Constantinople an estimated fifty thousand Sephardim contributed their talents to his rival empire. In 1551, a Spanish visitor to Turkey cursed the Portuguese Jews’ rearming of the military:


Would that it had pleased God that they had drowned in the sea in coming hither! For they taught our enemies the villainies of war such as how to make harquebusiers, gunpowder, cannonballs, brass ordnance and firelocks.36


As they had in the Mediterranean during Charles’s reign, Sephardim would come to dominate Caribbean commerce and the flow of wealth. The discovery of the Americas and the establishment of new sea routes to the East placed world trade within the ambit of Sephardim resettled throughout the known world. By midcentury, the land routes of the Middle Ages had given way to ocean highways. In Jamaica, before her death in 1549, Doña María worked with converso merchants to transform a nonperforming colony into a major transshipment port, a natural development (albeit illegal) for an island astride Spain’s trade routes to and from the New World.

Although Charles eventually expelled all New Christians from Antwerp, he continued to abide their presence in the New World. His son Philip II likewise found it in his fiscal interest to turn a blind eye to converso merchants and administrators and knowingly licensed New Christians to serve there as crown treasurers, notaries, and judges. As long as they genuflected to Jesus, no one questioned their faith. However, once they had established the lucrative commercial routes that directed all trade through Seville and Lisbon, they were expendable. When their presence was no longer needed, Old Catholic “purebloods” wanted in. Their means was the Inquisition.

The union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 brought with it a resurgence of Inquisition activity. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, as the Holy Terror descended on the New World, covert Jews began to look to Europe’s other powers to provide a haven outside the reach of the Grand Inquisitor. They would find one in the Low Countries on Europe’s northeast coast, in a corner of the empire battling for liberty, in revolt from Spain.

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