Thread by @FJSoyer

1/ Stories from the Archives of the Inquisition: In 1669 Jaime Frigola, a Catalan solider served in the Portuguese army was living a quiet life with his Portuguese wife.... until one day a letter arrived from Barcelona and he had some explaining to do. #twitterstorians

2/ Jaime Frigola was a mercenary (perhaps an exile after the unsuccessful Catalan revolt against the Spanish Crown between 1640 and 1652) serving in a cavalry outfit stationed on the Portuguese-Spanish border.

3/ In 1669, he had been married to a Portuguese woman for circa 11 months when one of his superior officers, a fellow Catalan named Rafael de Aux, received a letter addressed to Jaime Frigola.

4/ The officer opened and read it. The letter was in Catalan and from... Jaime Frigola's Catalan wife and her employer in Barcelona (the wife was working as a servant).

5/ The original letter in Catalan is included in the trial dossier (a Portuguese translation was made for the benefit of the Inquisitors).

6/

7/ Apparently Jaime Frigola has been attempting to find out whether his first wife in Barcelona was alive or dead. As you can imagine, neither she nor her employer, were particularly pleased and suspected that Jaime....

8/ ...wanted to know in order to get remarried in Portugal. They were right but Jaime Frigola got married to his (second) Portuguese wife without waiting to find out the status of his first spouse.

9/ The officer who had read the letter denounced Jaime Frigola as a bigamist to the tribunal of Lisbon.

10/ Marriage was a sacrament, divorce was not allowed. To marry when your first spouse was still alive was thus bigamy and a direct attack on a sacrament of the Church. Unfortunately for Frigola, this was an offence that fell within the jurisdiction of the Portuguese Inquisition.

11/ Jaime Frigola was arrested and imprisoned in Lisbon. In his trial, Jaime Frigola claimed that he had heard from his fellow soldier that his first wife had died and been buried.

12/ The inquisitors appear to have been disposed to be merciful. Jaime Frigola was spared a humiliating public sentencing, condemned to 3 years of garrison service in a frontier outpost in southern Portugal and various spiritual penances.

13/ His second marriage was declared illegal and the validity of the first reiterated. Moreover, he had to pay the costs incurred by the Inquisition during his trial (see the itemized bill below).

14/ This was a relatively lenient sentence. Was a shortage of soldiers in the Portuguese army a possible explanation? Quite possibly.

15 and final/ The complete surviving inquisitorial trial dossier (number 10446 of the Lisbon Inquisition) has been digitized by the Portuguese National Archives and is available online (open access):
digitarq.arquivos.pt/viewer?id=2310…