A Manuscript Carta Ejecutoria from Granada, 1572
This sumptuously decorated manuscript establishes the racial and confessional limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) of the Andalusian minor aristocrat Luis Melendez Calderón, through ornate brushed-gold decoration and equally elaborate textual genealogies sanctioned by a Spanish law court. Following the conclusion of the Iberian Christian Reconquista in 1492, cartas such as this were produced to confirm a family’s nobility and ensure their full legal rights and privileges of rank.
This double-page illuminated opening depicts members of the Calderón family piously kneeling and praying, including (left to right): two nobly dressed laywomen; two laymen, the fourth wearing his sword symbolizing his hidalgo status; a Jesuit priest (suggested by the birreta in his hands); and two tonsured monks, one a Benedictine (black robe and scapular) the other apparently a Cistercian (white robe with black scapular). Above appears a scene of angels being directed by the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven as they invest another tonsured Calderón ancestor in a finely embroidered ecclesiastical vestment; the banderole above is inscribed Gloria et honore coronasti eum (Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor).
This colorful sacra rappresentazione stands in sharp contrast to the entirely secular scene on the facing page, its borders filled with classicizing grotesques and a central escutcheon framed by the instruments of victorious battles ostensibly fought by past generations of the Calderón family against the Moors during the Reconquista—all badges of patriotic sacrifices made for Spain since time immemorial. Emblazoned at the center are the elaborate Calderón family arms, which feature the decapitated heads of eight Moors with their tongues as brutal signs of Christian military triumph over them.
From the eighth century onward, Muslims and Christians vied for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Reconquista. While the terms and conditions of religious coexistence varied over time during the so-called Convivencia between Jews, Moors, and Christians, these various confessional communities were generally able to live alongside one other, and even in some cases to intermarry. With their jointly issued Alhambra Decree of 1492, however, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile had expelled all practicing Jews from their lands, including Granada—the last independent Muslim state to revert to Christian rule.
Elsewhere in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella had already begun the process of “re-Christianizing” their kingdoms. This they achieved, in part, by reestablishing the Spanish Inquisition (an offshoot of the earlier medieval institution), whose primary purpose was to root out those who professed Christian beliefs outwardly, but were suspected of inwardly continuing to hold Jewish or Muslim beliefs and participate in clandestine religious observances. Faced with the challenge of deciphering the lineages of families that were entirely Christian, the monarchs of Spain and Portugal promulgated strict purity of blood laws, which forced renewed scrutiny of the historic ancestry of prominent families regardless of their publicly professed religious beliefs.
If a family could prove that its genuine Christian lineage was “untainted” by converso or morisco associations (i.e., Jewish and Moorish ancestors who had converted to Christianity), it was entitled to certain privileges of the noble Hidalguía, among them personal tax exemptions and protections from severe criminal and civil legal sanctions. In the estimation of some scholars, this legislation enshrined a shift toward thinking about Judaism in particular, not as a set of beliefs personally held, but as a racial distinction. These laws made it incumbent upon Hidalgos de sangre—noblemen whose lineal claims were ancient and immemorial and thus ostensibly unimpeachable—to obtain a legal judgment confirming their status from a royal chancery court, whether at Granada or more directly from the royal Castilian power center of Valladolid.
The primary legal instrument resulting from such a proceeding was a carta ejecutoria de hidalguía such as this, produced as an heirloom proudly celebrating the family’s credentials in a deluxe manuscript form. These cartas stood both as works of art and as important legal documents, marked by signatures and countersignatures of legal representatives, witnesses, and notaries. In the Calderón carta, the blank spaces of the final pages of this collection of testimonies and depositions are filled in with manuscript cancellations designed to prevent future scribes from adding information that could affect subsequent determinations about the validity of a family’s claim.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
David Graizbord, “A Crisis of Judeoconverso Identity and Its Echoes, 1391 to the Present,” in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (2019), esp. 4–11; Kevin Ingram, Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain (2018); Borja Franco Llopis and Francisco Javier Moreno Díaz del Campo, “The Moriscos’ Artistic Domestic Devotions Viewed through Christian Eyes in Early Modern Iberia,” in Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World, ed. Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin (2018), 107–25; Mauricio Drelichman, “Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits, and Local Political Control in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” Journal of Economic History 67, no. 3 (September 2007): 608–42; Elisa Ruiz García, “La carta ejecutoria de hidalguía un espacio gráfico privilegiado,” En la España Medieval (2006), Número Extraordinario 1 (Estudios de genealogía, heráldica y nobiliaria), 251–76; Norman Roth, “The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492,” in The Historian (1992), 17–30, esp. 23.
