The Expansion of tolerance

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Late nineteenth-century portrait of Padre António Vieira, based on seventeenth-century illustrations. of Evora for criticizing the Inquisition’s policies. He claimed the people punished in autos de fe were martyrs for their faith, and he had refused to attend an auto de fe in that city. He told friends that just as there had been lightning bolts from heaven when St. Barbara was martyred, he refused to 43
attend these public ceremonies because these people were also martyrs. The Inquisition’s actions he said, were only performed ‘to eat and spend the property of those arrested’. And when the town fool had remarked about the erection of a platform or cadafalso for an auto de fe and had quipped ‘cadafalso e bem falso’ (‘a stage of punishment and really false’), Lopes had said ‘sometimes the mad speak truths’. One accuser felt that Lopes was more a Jew than his wife, but another friend, the Old Christian tailor Domingos Gomes, remembered Lopes’s hypothetical question: if God did not want the New Christians to be Christians, why did the Inquisitorial gentlemen wish to make them Christians by force? 17 At about the same time, another case scandalized the Lisbon Inquisition. An inquisitorial visit to Brazil in 1618 had produced a large number of prisoners, many of them New Christians, who had been sent to Lisbon for their trials. On 25 September 1620, the jailer of the Inquisitorial prison reported that during the night shots had been fired in the city and that these had actually been signals for the prisoners that a general pardon had been signed in Madrid and that one of the Inquisitors had suddenly died. In other words, these were communications designed to give heart to the prisoners and to strengthen their resolve not to confess. But what the bailiff had told the Inquisitors was even more troublesome. The man who was interpreting these signals and who was organizing the resistance of the New Christian prisoners to the tribunal was a Catholic priest, Father Fernando Pereira de Castro, who had already earned a reputation in the prison for speaking out loudly in favor of New Christians, arguing that they were unjustly imprisoned and that the Inquisitors had exceeded their authority. If the New Christians remained firm, he promised, all would be released with ‘great honour’. One might have expected that Pereira de Castro was himself a New Christian, but that was not the case. He had been born in Goa and he was by his appearance and speech identified as a mestiço, that is, the child of a Portuguese and an Indian woman. Son of a fidalgo, he had grown up in the Estado da India, and like many of the young men of the Portuguese colony, he had become a soldier; but he also had a taste for reading and he eventually entered the priesthood, a somewhat exceptional situation since mestiço priests, although not unknown, were relatively rare. Pereira de Castro eventually travelled to Lisbon, studied at Coimbra, and then travelled to Brazil and Spain as well as visiting Milan and Rome. 44
Page 1 and 2: JONATHAN ISRAEL STUART B. SCHWARTZ
Page 4 and 5: The Expansion of Tolerance Religion
Page 6 and 7: Table of Contents 6 Introduction Mi
Page 8 and 9: century progressed, came to be rega
Page 10 and 11: gaining true momentum. More than 20
Page 12 and 13: Stuart B. Schwartz, in his contribu
Page 14 and 15: Jonathan Israel Religious Toleratio
Page 16 and 17: Theodore Matham, Engraved portrait
Page 18 and 19: The governing body of the WIC, the
Page 20 and 21: Frans Post, View of Olinda (1662).
Page 22 and 23: Catholics in the Dutch zone with th
Page 24 and 25: Joan Blaeu, Wall map of Dutch Brazi
Page 26 and 27: National Archives, The Hague, Arch.
Page 28 and 29: debts - which tended to have the un
Page 30 and 31: This same tendency to claw back wha
Page 32 and 33: deep into the eighteenth century -
Page 35 and 36: Frans Post, Battle at Porto Calvo (
Page 37 and 38: some extent a period of political a
Page 39 and 40: Ages when Christians, Jews, and Mus
Page 41 and 42: This sentiment was voiced repeatedl
Page 43: These ideas circulated widely. They
Page 47 and 48: Portuguese Responses to Religious T
Page 49 and 50: Theodore de Bry, America V (1595) i
Page 51 and 52: the extension of religious liberty
Page 53 and 54: Portuguese’, a paraphrase of the
Page 55 and 56: Frans Post, Engraving of Dutch ship
Page 57 and 58: Native American allies of the Dutch
Page 59 and 60: 16 Francisco Bethencourt, História
Page 61: Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Gold

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