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Francois Soyer

13 Oct, 12 tweets, 3 min read

1/ Stories from the Archives of the Inquisition: Meet Anne Gargill, the Quaker woman who traveled by ship to Portugal in 1656 to chat with the King and convert him... and instead got to chat with the Inquisition. #twitterstorians

2/ In 1654 Cromwell's England and the Kingdom of Portugal made a peace treaty that (re)established commercial links between the two countries.

3/ The treaty between Protestant England and Catholic Portugal was principally motivated by the need to form an alliance against Spain, which both countries were fighting. It was not popular with the Catholic Church in Portugal.

4/ In 1656, a 30 year-old woman landed in Lisbon, coming off a ship that had just arrived from Plymouth. She told some people that she wanted to talk to the King of Portugal about his Salvation.

5/ Missionary preaching of any kind by Protestants was illegal and the Portuguese Inquisition always kept a look out for such Protestant "dogmatizers". The English merchants who came on the same ship rightly feared that she was stirring trouble.

6/ Although the woman, whose named was Anne Gargill (transformed into Gargim in Portuguese records) was quickly taken back to the ship, news nevertheless got to the Inquisition. She was seized and interrogated.

7/ For the inquisitors, Anne represented somewhat of an oddity. They had never encountered the Quakers before. The interpreter exclaimed to them that he wasn't sure whether "Quakers" meant "those who are afraid or who tremble"...

8/ ... but the inquisitors rapidly realized that this was "a new sect" in England. The interrogation offers a remarkable insight into the inquisitors' desire to know more about this new "heresy"...

9/ ...and Anne was questioned long and hard about her beliefs, especially about the Holy spirit/spirit of God.

10/ The inquisitors were particularly intrigued when Anne claimed that her faith included "no ceremonies" (i.e. rituals) and that she refused to swear an oath on the Gospels or sign the transcript of her interrogation.

11/ The inquisitorial dossier contains a confiscated religious tract (in English).

12 and end/ Anne Gargill was ordered back to the ship and effectively expelled from Portugal. The original inquisitorial investigation has been digitized by the Portuguese National Archives and is available open access:
digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=231…

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More from @FJSoyer

Francois Soyer

@FJSoyer

12 Oct

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.

Read 15 tweets

Francois Soyer

@FJSoyer

11 Oct

1/ Stories from the Archives of the Inquisition. The Trials of Mateus Salomão in Palermo (1606) and Goa (1610-1614), A Case Study in the Inquisition’s Global Reach and why lying to the inquisitors about your previous trial is not a good idea. #twitterstorians

2/ The ability of the Inquisition to overcome the many obstacles presented by trials involving suspects who had travelled between continents is remarkably well illustrated by trial dossier number 5,037 in the archives of the Inquisition of Lisbon.

3/ Mateus Salomão, a military engineer, was arrested in September 1610 by the inquisitorial tribunal operating in Goa in India. Mateus Salomão traveled from Europe to Goa in 1602 to bolster the defenses of the Portuguese colony.

Read 35 tweets

Francois Soyer

@FJSoyer

10 Oct

1/ Stories from the archives of the Inquisition: A bigamist with a big problem, Don Francisco de Ovando knew how to game the Inquisition and find a solution to his problem in 1710. #twitterstorians

2/ In 1710, the Iberian Peninsula was wracked by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) . Essentially a civil war caused by two claimants for the Spanish throne: the Bourbon Philip V and the Habsburg Charles III. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_th…

3/ Catalonia supported the claim of Charles III and so did the neighboring kingdom of Portugal.

Read 18 tweets

Francois Soyer

@FJSoyer

9 Oct

1/ Stories from the archives of the Inquisition: The Trial of Father Pedro Furtado, alias "Father Paula", a priest in Sambade, a remote village in northern Portugal, who told his male sexual partners that he was a woman (1698-1701). #twitterstorians

2/ On the afternoon of 3 April 1698, a prisoner was led from the cells in the building of the inquisitorial tribunal in Coimbra, in Portugal to a building housing an “old chapel”. The prisoner was met by a doctor, a surgeon and two notaries of the Inquisition.

3/ The four men had been instructed by one of the inquisitors to conduct a thorough examination of the sexual organs of the prisoner “to ascertain whether he was a woman or a hermaphrodite”.

Read 18 tweets

Francois Soyer

@FJSoyer

14 Nov 18

1/ Inquisitorial Trials can contain unexpected finds #2. In 1542, the Portuguese Inquisition arrested Diogo de Leao, a cobbler, on suspicion of being a crypto-Jew. For historians, his trial dossier contains an unexpected historical treasure.
#twitterstorians

2/ Among his possessions, they found a hoard of documents in Hebrew (wills/marriage contracts) dating from before the forced conversion of the Jews of Portugal by King Manuel in 1497.

3/ Some more examples....

Read 7 tweets

Francois Soyer

@FJSoyer

17 Oct 18

1/ Stories from the Archives of the Portuguese Inquisition: the sad life of Jose Martins, the "she-man" (macho femea) of Ervedal (1725).

2/ The trial of Joseph Martins, an impoverished young shepherd residing in the village of Ervedal in south-central Portugal, offers a sad story of social ostracism and rape.

3/ The document that initiated the judicial proceedings against Joseph Martins was a letter from a concerned parish priest, which was forwarded to the Inquisition by his superior.

Read 30 tweets

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