Elizabeth’s most secret agent
If one wishes to grasp the dark and immeasurably complicated world of the Elizabethan era it often helps to find one person and use them as a fixed point by which one can navigate through the umbral mirk.
For me, there is no better North Star to use than Thomas Phillipes; the man who Charles Nicholl’s describes as ‘’the commissioner, the aparatchik, the interrogator, the secret policeman par excellence” (Nicholl p411).
His story illustrates, perfectly, how politics changed in the era, and how a man could rise and fall several times within a life. At one point he was arguably one of the most important agents of Queen Elizabeth I; later he was a penniless and broken soul rotting in jail. This unremarkable looking man was to be involved in the deaths of monarchs and famed playwrights; in forgery and fraud; he was both a crucial member of the English intelligence services under Elizabeth and a victim of the same service under James.
Description and Early Life
Our only description of him comes from a woman whose life he helped terminate- Mary, Queen of Scots. She describes him as ‘slender in every way, dark yellow hair on his head, and clear yellow beard’. His face was ‘eaten’ by small pox scars and he was myopic; he wore glasses.
He was born around 1556 in London; his father was one William Philips, a cloth merchant and minor functionary at the Customs House. Thomas grew up smart. Very smart. He quickly excelled at academia and we know he matriculates from Trinity College, Cambridge, with a Masters in 1577, aged only 19.
He was a highly skilled mathematician (one could say brilliant) but he was also an expert linguist; we know he could speak French, German, Latin, Spanish and Italian. His handwriting is neat, small, precise; he writes in italic; his words for such a skilled linguist are mostly parsimonious. This was an organised mind; ferocious and single focused.
At some point during his studies he comes to the attention of none other than Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queens private Secretary (Walsingham refers to a ‘young Philips’ in his staff suggesting he had caught the eye of the spymaster possibly while still at Cambridge) . But soon after graduating he completes his first job abroad for his master- he travels to Paris and joins the staff of English Ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet.
For two years he is employed by Paulet and begins to carve a niche out for himself. Very quickly Thomas Phillipes (his preferred spelling of his surname) became established as England’s first cryptoanalyst. He possessed the mathematical skills required to be a cryptographer, (and there were plenty of them around) but this coupled with his linguistic talents made him a unique figure.
If you wanted someone to break a code? You went to young Thomas. This was to be the story of his life.
He returned to England in 1579, and as often happens in his tale, he disappears into the shadows for a few years. We do not know what exactly he does in this period but we have some tantalising glimpses. He was in the same social circle as Peter Bales, the English writing master and creator of many of the ciphers used by Walsingham for correspondence with his agents. It would be remarkable to me to think that he didn’t use these few years to study under or with Bales, improving his skill.
Crucially his service in France was an important stepping stone; France was the testing ground for a host of English spies and agents; it was a place one ‘cut ones teeth’ in the dark arts of counter intelligence. Working for the ambassador had educated Thomas in the diplomatic world. It was now time for him to enter the world of espionage.
In 1582/83 Thomas was back in France, now on a much more clandestine mission; as far as we can tell he travelled under an alias to spend several months staying in or near the main post road between Lyons and Paris. This was the route used by Priests travelling from the English College in Rome and William Allen’s seminary in Rheims, to the French coast, and it is most probable that Thomas was sent there to intercept and decipher correspondence between these hotbeds of Catholic agitation in Europe and their supporters in England.
We know that even at such an early stage in his career Thomas’ code-breaking skills were well established; Walsingham used him as a code-breaker of last resort. Despite being undercover and even with the inherent risks of having mail intercepted, Walsingham is forced to write to Thomas in France to ask him to help decipher a particularly difficult coded letter.
In a moment that reveals much about his character, the young man replied that he deciphered the code as he travelled slowly back to Paris. It had been hard work. Not because the code itself was complicated; no, rather the message was written in Latin and the original writers mastery of the language was so dire it had led to many false readings.
He was in many ways a bit of an intellectual snob.
He returned to England having proven himself in ‘field work’. He was no longer just an academic type. He had graduated. His intelligence was a great asset; he was trusted and he was promoted.
By 1586, now 28, he was at the right hand of Sir Francis Walsingham. He was one of a small cabal of men (including William Waad who Walsingham employed for ‘heavy’ work) who helped Elizabeth’s principle secretary run a massive clandestine network of spies, informants and double agents. He was right in the heart of darkness itself. Brilliant, driven and dogged.
The Walsingham Years 1586-1590
The next four years turned out to be crucial in the history of England. Thomas Phillipes now found himself working with Walsingham on the biggest counter-Intelligence operation ever carried out during the era: the campaign to discover if Mary, Queen of Scots, was conspiring against Elizabeth.
Without getting into the staggering detail of what was to become known as the Babington plot (and when you do, you get to see just how much work he had to do) Thomas was crucial to the entire thing. He was Walsingham’s sounding board; his precise ‘muse’. He was the man Walsingham could bounce ideas off; who he worked closely with, inch by inch, as they infiltrated the network of agents and messengers for the Scottish Queen.
He wasn’t alone of course; he was involved in ‘turning’ her courier Gilbert Gifford to the crowns side; he began working with Robert Poley (who became a veteran of the English secret services); he employed men like the low level criminal Ingram Frazier to follow Babington around London; and he worked alongside old friends, such as William Waad and Sir Amias Paulet (his old boss, now designated Mary’s jailer). These men, plus others, were members of a dedicated group who broke open Mary’s information network.
Phillipes was key to it all. It was mostly he who arranged so that every letter she sent was intercepted, deciphered and then sent on. Driven by what he called (in a very modern idiom) the ‘security of the state’ Thomas not only sat and deciphered complex coded letters but was travelling up and down the country; establishing agents; keeping turncoats happy; devising strategies alongside Walsingham.
He was brilliant and ruthless in his pursuit.
His influence was truly seen in the infamous ‘doctored letter’. Simply, Walsingham and Thomas had a letter, in code, written out by Mary’s secretary, to Babington; a reply to his informing her of the plot to kill the queen with five other conspirators.
Walsingham and Thomas deciphered it and decided to add a small section. They wanted Babington to name his fellow conspirators. To do this would require Thomas to not only copy out the original coded letter in the style of the original (a prestigious act of forgery in its own right) but also add a new section that sounded consistent with Mary’s tone; it had to ask the conspiracy to reveal itself but not be obvious in doing so.
From the rough notes that exist we can see Walsingham and Phillipes laboured long over it; throwing out sentences and words that didn’t seem right. Two brilliant men labouring over what would become the biggest and best sting operation of the era.
The results were a success, the plot was exposed and by the following September Thomas Phillipes was a crucial element in the preparation for Walsingham and Lord Burghley of ‘proofs’ of Mary’s guilt. As the great men of state moved to ambush the Scottish Queen, Thomas was preparing documents, compiling and summarising the evidence and serving quietly in the background.
With her execution he had served his master’s well. Despite Elizabeth’s fury at her death, Thomas was recognised for his service to the Queen. He received an annual pension of 100 marks.
In the aftermath, with the Armada and the Cold War becoming a hot war, Thomas was engaged fully; running agents for Walsingham and breaking codes full time.
And then Walsingham died.
It escapes the notice of most - bar the few that explore the details of Portuguese Asiatic trade - that in fact there was one particular commodity that at least for the first few decades (1500-1530) was in enormous demand in Asia, which the Europeans could supply and that wasn't silver and gold coin. Although it's not far off, as the commodity in question is copper, another valuable metal, possibly even categorized as precious I wouldn't really know. Sadly, analysis of the copper trade gets at best only a side mention in the descriptions of the Portuguese spice trade with Asia - as true in modern academic works as it indeed was even back then by the contemporaries - which leaves us with lots of missing details and unanswered questions. But there is enough to start painting a picture that might shed some light on the issue, so let's dive in.
Reading Portuguese primary sources you can immediately grasp the importance of copper: be it in the descriptions of the Asiatic lands where it was frequently highlighted that copper was in great demand; or in reading the cargo and trade accounts of the early armadas where it is obvious that copper was by far the largest percentage of outgoing cargo. In fact, K.S. Mathew in his work "Maritime Trade of the Malabar Coast and the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century" argues that looking into the accounts of the Portuguese factors in India for the first few decades; gold and silver coins imports were only 1/4th of total value imported, while commodities - chief of which was copper by far - made astounding 3/4ths of total value.
To single out the importance of copper in a single quote it's best to use a letter from Afonso de Albuquerque from circa 1512 where he says that emissaries from Cambay (Gujurati sultanate) asked for Portuguese to deliver 40,000 quintals of copper (presumably annually), for the price of 18 xerafims per quintal. Now, I would be pretty surprised if these numbers meant anything to you so let's put them into context. Quintal was Portuguese unit of weight that corresponded to a value of either 51-52 or 58-59 kilograms (depending on if the new or old quintal was meant), so we can calculate that it means Gujaratis asked to import over 2000 tons of copper. Again, this absolute number is meaning without context, so let's compare with the European imports: Portuguese estimated the size of European pepper market at 25,000 - 30,000 quintals annually and aimed to import around that amount of spice (and frequently managed only less). In other words, Gujurati alone wanted to import more copper than Portuguese planned to import spice for entire Europe! Vast demand indeed.
More interesting is the analysis of the price. Eighteen xerafims comes to around 13.5 cruzado per quintal, as is supported by other sources that list the price of copper in India around that period ranging from the lowest at 12 cruzado to as high 18, and even 20 cruzados - the average being around 14 cruzados. The value in cruzados probably doesn't mean much to you as well, but it helps us to compare the price in Europe. Namely, Portuguese were buying copper in Antwerpen by the price of only 4.5 cruzado per quintal. That's 3x the difference in price between Europe and India! An enormous profit, albeit when contrasted again to pepper it might seem less impressive: since 1506 Portuguese struck a deal to buy pepper for around 3 cruzados a quintal, while at the same time they fixed the sales price in Lisbon at least 22 cruzados a quintal, a whooping 7x increase. All in all, if Portuguese bought copper in Europe, sold it in India and with earnings bought pepper and then sold it back in Europe they multiply their profits and could get over 20 times as much as the initial investment!
Oh, and believe it the Portuguese were very eager to jump on this opportunity and immediately set about to use copper as the main medium of exchange, both in Europe and India, although they hadn't really succeeded at either end. In India it seems pepper producers insisted that they are paid in gold coins and refused and another way of compensation by barter, refusing both Indian goods let alone European ones. The best Portuguese could do was get a deal with King of Cochin to pay him 3/4th of the price of 3 cruzados in gold, and the final one-fourth in copper. Deals were also attempted to be made with families like Welsers and Fuggers which controlled Central European copper (and silver) mining operations, but again negotiations and deals frequently fell through (and some involved bankrupted) as the sides couldn't reach agreement on details like price, quantities and particularly the Portuguese insistence the copper is paid for by pepper from the next year arrival which understandably didn't sit well with the suppliers who preferred to be paid in cash and naturally immediately on delivery. Still, some kind of deals were made, as numbers show the Portuguese were exporting on average 4,000 quintals of copper in the first decade, and around 6,000 quintals in the second decade (although the examples listed don't show any year's imports going above 6,000, so this might be the maximum).
This is where the story begins to be both interesting and harder to explain. 6,000 quintals are far cry from 40,000 quintals we mentioned above. And we know also the Portuguese ships had the capacity to carry more than this, so why the comparably small amount? The first thought is that the original number estimated is too high, which might be true, but again Portuguese factors continued asking for more copper to be sent. It seems rather more likely that Portuguese had trouble securing more than this amount of copper in Europe without the price increase, or were afraid of the price of copper dropping in India, and settled for the amount that was just enough to secure their 25,000 quintals of pepper (for which 6000 quintals of copper was enough). Admittedly this is all more speculative, and it gets worse from here.
I don't have any numbers for the rest of the sixteenth century and it seems by the 1580s, copper was mostly dropped as an import item. Why is that is unknown to me? I suspect the changes in prices of copper upwards in Europe and downward in India may be responsible, but other then some data that copper/pepper price ratio in India dropped from 4:1 to 2.5:1, I am having trouble finding comprehensive price trends for both areas. I continue my readings on the topic but felt that this so far could fit here. I hope it was interesting, although I suspect import numbers aren't the top of "fun" things to read about. For me, the interesting thing about the copper market is the possibility of the relative scarcity of copper in India, and the high prices might have been a reason behind the comparatively worse artillery Indians had at the time of arrival of Portuguese. I mean, if copper is literally worth a fortune, you don't go around poring a couple of tons of it for a good cannon, do you?
Like the story about the Count of Tendilla, this one is not very well known, but I think it is worth telling. If you were to be asked who was the first black university professor, and when did he start teaching, what would you say? Maybe someone from the early XX century in America or France? Well, it was much earlier. The first black professor was Juan Latino, professor of Latin language and grammar at the University of Granada, in the mid-XVI century.
Juan Latino was born Juan de Sessa, a slave to the Count of Cabra and his wife the Duchess of Sessa, although some say he was the bastard son of the Count of Cabra and a black slave. Juan was a man of very vivid intellect, and a close friend to the dukes' son Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba y Fernández de Córdoba. When Gonzalo was studying at the University of Granada, Juan, being a slave, could not attend the lessons, but listened from outside and learnt as much as he could with his friend Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba.
So much did he learn, that he ended up taking the graduation exam and passed it, being praised as a great latinist. He graduated as bachelor of philosophy on the 2nd of February 1546, as it is evident from the graduation document present in the archive of the University of Granada, signed by Master of Arts Benedicto del Peso. He obtained his graduate degree (licenciado) in 1557, and of master of Latin the next year.
The Bishop of Granada don Pedro Guerrero could not fail to notice this man. When the position of professor of Latin language and grammar was available that year, Juan Latino was the strongest candidate for the job, and the jury composed by Pedro Guerrero, the count of Tendilla (a great latinist and son of the count of Tendilla I wrote about last time), and Pedro de Deza. He passed, and became the first black university professor.
His presence is continuous in the records of the University of Granada, attending the University's Senate meetings in his position as professor. So much was Juan Latino's fame that he was responsible of giving the inaugural adress in 1565, an extremely high honour that clearly states Latino's fame.
While he was professor of Latin, he had an affair with one of his students, Ana de Carleval, daughter of one Granada's knights 24 (councilmen), and married her. They lived happily and had four children, not having any known problems regarding their race. Juan was a highly regarded scholar in his lifetime, and for many years after that, having been lauded by Cervantes and many other authors. He died at 78 years old in Granada.
Sources:
Wright, E. R (2016), The epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of race and Religion in Renaissance Spain. Toronto: University Press
González Garbín, A (1886), Glorias de la Universidad de Granada: el negro Juan Latino, in Boletín del Centro Artístico de Granada
Sánchez Marín, J.A. and Muñoz Martín M.N (2009), "El Maestro Juan Latino en la Granada renacentista. Su ciudad, su vida, sus protectores", in Florentia Iliberritana: Revista de Estudios de Antigüedad Clásica
Possessed by the Dead in the Holy Land
In the second half of the 16th century, a small town in the mountains of the Holy Land suffered through an epidemic of spirit possession.
Following the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, the Sephardi Jewish population spread across the mediterranean, with a fairly large number settling in the Holy Land. They brought with them not only an enthusiasm for kabbalistic mysticism, but also a positive orientation towards death (that it was all around us and a part of everyday life) that differed from the ideas of the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe, where it was thought of as a domain of terror and dread.
Furthermore, the town of Tzfat (also called Safed) was itself peculiar when it came to death. R. Moshe Alsheikh wrote in 1591 that Tzfat was a city
which has forever been a city of interred dead, to which people from throughout the lands of exile came to die. A holy place, a city of our God from the day of its founding, they come to die there and be buried.
J.H. Chajes, whose book Between Worlds is the major source of this information, writes that Tzfat
is a city that lives with its dead, its stone domiciles and synagogues poised on sloping hills that are home to 20,000 dead, whose graves begin only a few steps beyond the homes of the living.
The graveyard is always within view.
During the second half of the 16th century, some of the greatest kabbalists in history were living in Tzfat, among them Isaac Luria (the founder of Lurianic Kabbalah, the system through which modern mystical study continues to be framed) and his student, Chaim Vital. Vital wrote about all of their adventurings as they were happening, and these writings continue to be available to us. They describe the system of kabbalistic study that Luria founded, but they also describe a number of case studies related to dybbuk possession, a concept that originated with them.
A dybbuk, according to this school of thought, was the disembodied, wandering soul of a dead Jew that would possess the body of a living Jew. In most or all cases, the disembodied soul had committed some sort of heinous heretical or blasphemous act, like adultery with a gentile, or using one’s standing as a student/teacher of Torah for nefarious means. The soul would be forced to wander as punishment, and the unbearable pain and loneliness would lead them to find a similarly (though less) sinful host that they could possess in order to find a rabbi and achieve some sort of cosmic rectification.
To illustrate the concept, I’ll briefly tell the story of “The Spirit in the Widow in Tzfat” (written by Vital, found in Chajes’ book):
A spirit entered a widow and “made her suffer great and enormous suffering.” The townsfolk came to watch her and she began to divine things about them, telling each one the deepest, darkest secrets of the other. Her relatives went to Rav Isaac Luria for help, and he sent his student, Chaim Vital, along with some appropriate incantations (kavvanot).
When Vital approaches the dybbuk-possessed widow, she looks away from him. When he asked why, the spirit tells him that “I am unable to gaze upon your face, for the wicked are unable to gaze upon the face of the Shekhina (presence of God)!” Remember that Vital is writing this scene about himself, so this is an opportunity to let everyone know how great he is despite his status as a student–a running theme in his writing.
Vital then asks what the dybbuk’s sin was that led him here. The spirit tells him that he “sinned” with a married woman and fathered bastards. As punishment, his soul has been wandering the land for 25 years with three angels of destruction following him and beating him relentlessly along the way. His punishment will last as long as his bastard children live. In fact, his sin was so awful that he made his way to Gehinnom (the place where souls go to be bleached for a year before they can enter paradise–sort of like purgatory), but the million souls of evildoers and murderers came out of its gates and told him there’s no room for his degree of sinfulness there.
The spirit then wandered all the way to around India, but saw that the Jews there have “defiled themselves” by marrying gentiles, so he didn’t want to make his situation worse and left. He made his way back to Gaza, where he tried to possess a pregnant doe. It was tremendously painful because his soul didn’t fit in the doe’s body (“for one walks upright and the other bent”) and he didn’t like the kind of food the doe eats. The doe didn’t have space for the souls of both the dybbuk and its unborn fetus, so its belly split and she died. He then made his way to a town where Jews and Ishmaelites (Muslims) lived side-by-side, and possessed a Kohen (a Jew from the Priestly class). The Kohen went to a Muslim cleric who exorcized him.
Finally, the dybbuk made his way to Tzfat, where he spent the night in this widow’s house. When Chaim Vital asks the spirit why he was given permission to enter this woman, and he explains that the woman was trying to light a fire in her house and had trouble, and subsequently lost her cool. Vital intimates that that’s not much of a reason to receive that kind of permission, so the dybbuk reveals the true reason:
Know, my master the sage, that this woman’s inside is not like her outside, for she does not believe in the miracles that the Holy One, blessed be He, did for Israel, and in particular in the Exodus from Egypt. Every Passover night, when all of Israel is rejoicing and good hearted, saying the great Hallel and telling of the Exodus from Egypt, it is vanity in her eyes, a mockery and a farce. And she thinks in her heart that there was never a miracle such as this.
Essentially, she questioned the teachings of her religion. Vital confronts her about it, she apologizes, and he decrees a ban on the spirit to leave the body of the widow through her little toe on her left foot, which will subsequently be destroyed and useless.
The following nights, the spirit continued to attempt to enter the doorways and windows of the widow’s house, so her family brought Vital back to check her mezuzahs. One of the doorways didn’t have a mezuzah, so Luria commanded that a proper kosher one be installed, and the spirit did not return.
SO, where does this story leave us? Beyond being a fun story about death and spirit possession, there are a number of things we can learn about Jewish life and practice in this region at this specific moment in time:
-About concepts of the soul, we can see that souls are understood to have some degree of physicality. The spirit can be beaten and experience pain, while its possession of a living body must be a proper physical fit, as we saw in the way his soul didn’t fit in the body of the pregnant doe. We can also see that there’s an idea of a body only being able to hold a certain number of souls, as the doe couldn’t hold both the dybbuk and her fetus.
-On the always-important topic of how Jews interact with and conceptualize their neighbours, we can see that Muslim magic is thought of as similarly effective, though lesser than Jewish magic.
-Concerning gender dynamics, we’d have to look at more stories, but the general theme is that male spirits possess (penetrate) female hosts. Occasionally males enter males, and almost never do female spirits enter male hosts.
-Most importantly, concerning the central question of proper practice, or how to live Jewishly, this story is a treasure trove. It offers us a sort of spectrum of Jewishness, from the most awful Jew to the greatest Jew. On the horrible end of the spectrum is the dybbuk, who is so terrible that he is forced to wander. The very bad but not horrible Jew is the widow who questions her faith and in the process opens herself up to possession. Closer to the middle are the townsfolk who stand around watching the spectacle, and whose darkest secrets are revealed. Moving towards the good are the family members who seek help and the local rabbis. Near the great end of the spectrum are Isaac Luria and Chaim Vital, who devote their lives to these issues and desire to achieve greatness. There’s an end to the spectrum that didn’t come up in this story, the exceptionally great, hall-of-fame Jews known as the Sages (that’s a story for another day, but very briefly, Luria had a practice of clinging his soul to those of the wisest rabbis from Jewish history in order to learn from them).
In a sense, this story serves as a handbook for how to be a good Jew (and how to avoid being a bad Jew). It also speaks to a certain anxiety, given the massive influx of Jews from a number of different communities at this time, of what constitutes proper practice. If improper practice can lead to this kind of horror, then it would be essential to suss out what should and would be considered proper.
Chajes, Jeffrey Howard. Spirit Possession and the Construction of Early Modern Jewish Religiosity. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2000.
Chajes, Jeffrey Howard. Between Worlds - Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism. University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
1492 is often seen as one supposedly "glorious beginning" of the (early) modern period in Europe. But from the start Columbus' American voyages also show some of the Spanish Crown's main overseas interests: finding precious metals and indigenous people to serve as work forces.
Including, you know, slavery.
I have read that Columbus brought back 10 to 25 natives from his first voyage to the Americas. Seven or eight are said to have made it to Spain alive. Do we have any idea what happened to these seven or eight survivors?
(adapted from an earlier answer)
When Columbus sailed through the Bahamas he took aboard seven Taínos. They would be brought to Spain with him, with the intention of teaching them Castilian and Christianity in order to aid with the conversion when they returned. These seven and a few others were then brought to the Castilian court in 1493, with the additional goal of serving as evidence of Columbus "discoveries".
For Anthony Pagden they should also show the Catholic Monarchs that although the Caribbean proved poor in spices and gold, they might still be rich in "human merchandise", meaning slaves and work forces - Queen Isabella's attempts at breaking the Portuguese monopoly over the Atlantic slave trade had not worked out. But he also "brought them back as specimens, so that Their Majesties might see what people these Indies had in them", so as proof of his voyages.
One of the first chroniclers of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo is our main source for Columbus' arrival in Barcelona. There the native Americans where baptized. Their leader was baptized as don Fernando de Aragón, who was a relative of the important cacique or native leader Guacanagari (who had first welcomed Columbus on Hispaniola). Another, baptized after Columbus as Diego Colon, became an important interpreter for Columbus.
Oviedo then tells us in his Historia de las Indias
And another one they called don Juan de Castilla, and others they gave other names still, following their wishes [sic], or their patrons allowed to be given to them, in accordance with the Catholic Church. ... the prince [don Juan] wanted this [don Juan de Castilla] with him, and wanted him to stay in his royal house so that he would be well treated as if he was the son of an important gentleman [or knight] whom he loved very much.
... and I [Oviedo] saw this indio who spoke already well Castilian, and after two years he died. All the other indios returned to this island in the second voyage of the Admiral [Columbus]. [my transl.]
So of the circa 7 Taínos all were brought back to the Caribbean to aid with conversion, except for one who stayed with prince don Juan until his death two years later.
For Columbus there were no problems with taking these indigenous people captive, since at that point, they could still be seen in Europe as "barbarians" according to Aristotelian ideas - without having converted to Christianity they could be described as inferior, pagan and "less than human", and according to Columbus were "fit to be ordered about and made to work".
The Spanish monarchs were thus very early traffickers in native slaves. While the Spanish Crown at this point started issuing decrees to protect the natives and to convert them, at first such commands were mostly ignored by Columbus and other Spaniards in the Caribbean.
Interestingly, Bartolomé de las Casas saw these Taínos in Seville as a young man. He would serve under Columbus and later become a strong advocate for the Americas' native population, which directly led to the Leyes Nuevas of 1542 officially ending native slavery (although it continued unofficially, on which more below).
These Taínos brought as slaves to Castille were a mere "footnote" for Columbus as proof for his own explorations - he loses interest when they are declared not to be slaves. But I think it's important to note for context that they were far from alone in their fate.
First off: More slave shipments followed, including one of circa 600 Carribbean natives, and one of circa 500 Taínos in 1500 to Spain. Many of them died partly due to disease, but also probably since they were completely uprooted from their environments.
In 1508 a census listed that only 60.000 native people were left in Hispaniola (modern day Dom-Rep and Haiti) - there are estimates of ca. 3 million several hundred thousand Tainos in the Caribbean before contact. Las Casas stated that by 1542 (the time of the Leyes nuevas) there were only about 200 Taínos left in Hispaniola, a similar fate shared by other native groups in the Caribbean. Charles C. Mann in 1493 notes that although no Taínos have survived today, according to modern research their DNA is possibly carried on by Dominicans of African or European descent today.
Second I'll briefly note that native slavery did not end abruptly with the Leyes Nuevas, and that this was a practice spanning the Spanish Americas, Caribbean, Portugal and Spain. Nancy van Deusen has written a great book ("Global Indios") on this, where she describes distinct phases:
First between 1500-1542 "the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people from America and elsewhere" (including Africa) due to the "open-ended exceptions of just war and ransom". Just war had served as a justification for war against Muslims in medieval Iberia and continued to be used for conquest campaigns in the Americas.
A second phase begins with the Leyes Nuevas of 1542 under Charles and heavily influenced by Bartolomé de las Casas. These already mentioned laws stated that native Americans were human, vassals of the Spanish Crown and free - effectively prohibiting enslavement of native people for just war or ransom.
However, the New Laws included important loopholes which led to enslavement of native people continuing circa until the late 16th/early 17th century, albeit in much smaller numbers (numbering rather in the thousands regarding Castile). This meant that native people from Spanish America were still being brought to Spain at that time, often via Portugal. They would then use legal mechanisms open to them to argue for freedom, often successfully.
At the same time, Spanish America's population throughout the colonial era continued to be majorly indigenous. At least in the colonial centres this meant various forms of indigenous labor, including forced labor. From the very beginning too, Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas.
The end of native slavery then for the Spanish coincided with a massive increase of - clearly still very much allowed - African slavery, with various forms of unfree labor enabling and forming the backbone of the colonial economy.
Edit: a number
You've heard that Elisabeth Báthory (1560-1614 C.E.) was a seductively beautiful bisexual siren, a butcher, a vampire, a cannibal, a demon. She is history's first documented female serial murderer, and she's also the most prolific serial killer of all time (of any gender).
If you know one thing about Báthory, it's that she tortured 650 virgin girls to death and bathed in their blood to preserve her eternal youth.
If you know a second thing about Báthory, it's that modern "scholars" allege that the crown subjected her to a "show trial" -- a corrupt, misogynist monarch's cash- and land-grab -- that deprived an innocent woman of her life, liberty, and property.
Everything you know is wrong.
OUTLINE:
PART I: A BASIC BIOGRAPHY OF ELISABETH BÁTHORY
Elisabeth was born in 1560 at the Báthory palace at Ecsed, a Hungarian city on the border of Royal Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania. In 1570 (when Elisabeth was 10), one of the patriarchs of the Báthory family ascended to the Princedom of Transylvania, and her family ruled the principality for the vast majority of her life. In an era when a noble family was wealthy if they owned a single castle, the Báthory family owned dozens of castles, thousands of acres of land, and tens of thousands of enslaved serfs. Elisabeth Báthory was the Jackie Kennedy, or perhaps the Princess Diana, of her era.
In 1571, Elisabeth's parents betrothed her to Hungary's most eligible (and wealthy) bachelor: Francis Nadasdy. Elisabeth left her home at age 11 and moved to the heart of Royal Hungary to her future husband's estates. Elisabeth and Francis married in 1575, when Elisabeth was 14, at an astronomically lavish wedding with 4,500 guests.
Elisabeth and Francis had 5 children, 3 of whom survived to adulthood. Anna Nadasdy was born in 1585, two infants were born and died between '85 and '96, Kate Nadasdy was born in 1594, and Paul Nadasdy was born 1598. Francis Nadasdy died in 1604 after a long and glorious military career massacring Turks. He is still a Hungarian national hero to this day.
It's unclear when Elisabeth Báthory started butchering local adolescent girls. There is no evidence that she murdered anyone before 1590 (age 30). By 1602 (age 42), however, her atrocities were so well known that her local Lutheran pastor publicly threatened to excommunicate Báthory and her accomplices from her home church.
Before 1609, Báthory's targets consisted exclusively of peasant girls. In 1609, however, Báthory opened a gynaeceum, a finishing school for young women of noble birth, at her estate at Csejthe ("CHY-tuh" or "CHEH-tuh") in Royal Hungary. Within a couple of weeks of admitting young women to her school, they were all dead. While peasants had no legal rights in 17th-century Hungary, nobles had all kinds of legal rights under the law, including rights to life, liberty, property, due process of law, and trial by a jury of one's peers. Although no one gave a fig about Báthory murdering hundreds of peasants, as soon as she killed a couple noblewomen, the crown ordered two separate investigations into her alleged crimes.
In 1609-10 (when Báthory was 49), the King of Hungary, Matthias II von Habsburg, personally and publicly demanded an investigation and trial. Hungary's royal palatine (chief law enforcement officer, chief administrator, and personal representative of the king) interviewed some 200 witnesses, all of whom testified to various accusations of torture, brutality, and murder by the hundreds.
Interestingly, Báthory hosted the king of Hungary himself at her home on Christmas Eve 1610, just 6 days before the palatine arrested her and 4 accomplices on Dec. 30. Even more interestingly, representatives of all 3 of Elisabeth's children arrived with the palatine and witnessed her arrest and imprisonment. (The representatives were Nicholas Zrinyi, husband of Anna Nadasdy; George Drugeth de Hommona, husband of Kate Nadasdy; and Imre Megyeri, legal guardian of 12 year-old Paul Nadasdy during his minority.) Báthory's children knew of and consented to her arrest in advance!
Four Báthory accomplices (all staff and servants at her estate) were questioned, tried, convicted, sentenced to death, tortured, and executed between Jan. 2 and Jan. 7, 1611, within 8 days (!!) of their initial arrest. (Poetically, today, Jan. 2, 2020, is exactly the 409th anniversary of the trials against the 4 accomplices.)
Although Báthory's accomplices were immediately tried, convicted, tortured, and executed, the state never tried or convicted Elisabeth Báthory of any crime. Despite the mountains of evidence that Báthory was guilty of torture and multiple murder, there was no trial. And yet despite the lack of a trial, the palatine imprisoned Elisabeth for life in her manor at Csejthe. Báthory died 4 years later in 1614 (age 54), having never left Csejthe since the night of her arrest.
PART II: HOW MANY GIRLS DID BÁTHORY KILL?
The estimates range from 30 to 650.
Although you're most likely to hear that she killed "650 girls," "over 600 girls," or "nearly 700 girls," this estimate is certainly false. The real number is somewhere between 30 and 300.
Only one witness, a peasant named Susannah, testified that she heard rumours that Báthory killed 650 girls. Susannah testified that another servant, Jakob Szilvassy, had seen the Countess' registry, list, or diary that recorded all the murders, and then told Susannah about it. When authorities called Szilvassy to testify, however, he never mentioned the diary, nor is there any other evidence the diary existed. No witness other than Susannah testified to 650 victims -- in fact, the second-highest estimate was less than half that. To say this testimony is extremely unpersuasive is an understatement.
In contrast to Susannah, Báthory's 4 accomplices testified that they killed between 30 and 50 girls with the Countess. On one hand, these numbers are more likely to be accurate than other estimates since the accomplices were literally there. On the other hand, the accomplices had an incentive to minimize the number of victims in an attempt to minimize punishment, and therefore these numbers could be lower than the true count.
Relatedly, the castellan of Elisabeth's home castle at Sárvár testified that 175 girls "had died." He specifically stated that he did not know how they died because he was not permitted inside the Countess' house. There are two reasons to question his is testimony. Firstly, is it believable that the head servant, the overseer of her estate, was not permitted in the house? This doesn't make that much sense, unless the castellan intended to say that he was not allowed into the Countess' private rooms. Secondly, the castellan may have been biased because he had either a nominally or actually close relationship with Báthory: he named his daughters Elisabeth, Anna, and Katherine after the Lady and her own daughters. As with the accomplices, we must ask: does this potential bias mean his estimate is likely too low?
Another Sárvár castellan testified that he heard rumours that between 200 - 300 victims died from torture at Sárvár.
Similarly, when the palatine and the king corresponded in official court documents about the inquests, the palatine stated that he arrested Elisabeth "for the murder of up to 300 maidens". Even though the palatine, as the top law enforcement official, had an incentive to charge Báthory with the most serious crimes he could, he didn't find any reasonable suspicion to support the 650 estimate.
TL;DR: Báthory and her accomplices likely killed somewhere between 30 and 300 young girls, but we'll never know the exact count. Although sensationalists love to report that the Countess kept a diary listing 650 victims, no reasonable person could believe that after full consideration of the evidence.
Even if the real number is "only" 30 victims, Báthory still numbers among the most prolific serial killers of all time, and is certainly the most prolific female serial killer.
Well, in the spirit of this series to expand beyond purely Europe, I thought I would do something a little different. We see a lot of shallow Western history monarchal biopics with chalk White casts. So, I'm going to do London's immigrant community, which includes non-White people.
Firstly, there were the most familiar people; merchants from France, Savoy, Navarre, Germans from the Holy Roman Empire, Italians. Although it is true there was much less diversity in the Medieval Period than something like modern day America or Brazil, travellers and even settlers from other countries had existed for much of it. Hanseatic League traders were majors rivals to local cloth industry merchants in Late Medieval London ("London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200-1500" by Caroline Barron, review by Barbara Hanawalt, 2004). An interesting example of integration is the judge and official Julius Caesar who was born of Italian immigrants, and what a classic name to capture that heritage! There were even tanned-skinned Italians, like the Bassini brothers ;who worked in Elizabeth I's musicians company. Despite being Europeans, they were even treated with a certain amount of racism in at least one incident for being quite tan (Chapter I, "Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years", John Guy (2016). The Bassini brothers were part of a larger community of converso Jews (supposedly converted, often still covertly practising), in the later part of the 16th century Jews from Iberia, Spain and Portugal, fled the Spanish Inquisition and a number ended up in London. Roderigo Lopes was a Portuguese converso who became Elizabeth's chief physician before he was accused, it seems falsely, of treason and executed. Dutch immigrants also fled the Netherlands because of their war with Spain, and like many of the other immigrant peoples there involved in successful industries like trade and medicine led to tensions. Irish, Welsh, and Scottish people were also familiar in southern England for a long time. "Nomads Under the Westway: Irish Travellers, Gypsies and Other Traders in West London" by Christopher Griffin discussed Irish immigrants in England in detail, although it is primarily about later centuries.
Despite their lack of depiction, during the Medieval Period African people were not unknown in Western Europe, in particular from Morocco and Ethiopia- there was a fabulous comment about Ethopia in the "Discovery of Europe" floating feature last. In the second half of the 16th century with the war with the Iberian Hapsburg monarchy, an increasing number of Portugese slaves from North and West Africa were taken as booty by English pirates and privateers. These people were technically freed when captured, as by the law at the time there were no slaves on English soil. But a lot of them were indebted to and dependent on those that freed them, how can they leave, so they functioned a bit like sharecroppers. At least some Black people in London, especially second-generations who sometimes had White English mothers or fathers, appear to have operated on a free basis, but many of the new intake were still basically slaves. The primary places we see Black people are as performers or house servants. The earliest evidence we have of them is in images of trumpeters in public venues or processions. Near the end of the century and as we turn over the fin de siecle there is an increasing presence of the house servants as grooms, pages, cooks and laundrywomen. Some of London's Black people appear to have done relatively well for themselves or at least been reasonably treated, but some Black people were probably underpaid compared to White counterparts in similar jobs and there was a lot of potential for abuse.
These articles include a number of interesting personal examples, and are a good starting point for the unfamiliar if you don't want to read a whole journal article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18903391
by Prof Michael Wood.
review of "Black Tudors" by Miranda Kaufmann.
It's important to consider the state of racism at this time. With no set narrative the way there is under slavery, it was instead rawer and more varied, ranging from apathy, "noble savage" ideas, exoticised curiosity to visceral physical negativity. Tamara E. Lewis describes some of the more visceral reactions in "'Like Devils out of Hell': Reassessing the African Presence in Early Modern England" (2016). Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan in "Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans" (1997) describe some of the more nuanced aspects; the way travellers accounts sometimes differentiate between different African peoples, and the way representation could be less heartless and dehumanising. Overall, this a fascinating part of the community that deserves more representation for their distinct and interesting situation.
There were other non-White peoples as well. In the first news article link it mentions a Persian, Indians and a Bengali living in the same parish as Black people and French and Dutch immigrants (that parish sounds strikingly diverse compared to the usually homogenous depictions doesn't it?) The situation of Islam was interesting because while Protestants did not see them as equal, theoretically they were intolerable heretics, but their shared interests vis a vis Catholics could lead to occasionally a small amount of solidarity. This is most pronounced in trade, diplomacy and attempts at military coordination: which gave a degree of more positive exposure to some of the merchant and courtier class. Nabil Matar in "Britons and Muslims in the early modern period: from prejudice to (a theory of) toleration" even describes how a number of English people went to live in islamic lands around the turn of the century. Christopher Griffin mentions that the first significant population of Romani (Gypsy) people in England arrived in 16th century.
It is interesting that is the first, European and most White minority group that actually attracted the most active and dangerous displays of xenophobia. Foreign, or foreign-descended, European merchants were the targets of both the Evil May Day riot in Henry VIII's time and the riots of 1593 and 1595 in Elizabeth's time, and in Elizabeth's time it was second-generation Dutch Protestant, who were neither especially different or threatening. Money turns out to be biggest factor in making xenophobia into action, as an uncomfortably familiar "they terk er jebs" type of narrative was the key incentive here; not targeting the very vulnerable but the more successful out of envy. Also in an odd subversion of the power dynamic we see in the Altantic Slave Trade, it was the Crown that was most sympathetic to these continental traders, indeed also to the Black people who were often employed by courtiers. "Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London" by Jacob Selwood (2010) deals significantly with this dynamic.
So to conclude, London in the Long Sixteenth Century between Henry VII and James I was a significantly more diverse place than the way it is often depicted: with barely any diversity. And those who did belong to minority groups dealt with quite complex situations, with both difficulty and prejudice, but also occasionally reward.
Is there a podcast for this stuff?
Welcome to Volume VIII of 'The Story of Humankind', our current series of Floating Features and Flair drive!
#Volume VIII brings us to a time of great achievements, and of great sorrows, and we welcome everyone to share history that related to that period, whatever else it might be about. Share stories, whether happy, sad, funny, moving; Share something interesting or profound that you just read; Share what you are currently working on in your research. It is all welcome!
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