Page 25 - Chinese SIlver By Adrien Von Ferscht

In the 16th century, Potosi was nothing more than a backwater town. By the mid-17th
century the population of Potosi was in the region of 160,000, equal to the population of
Paris and London at the time and probably double that of Madrid. Potosi, though, grew as
a city of many colours and creeds.

The merging of the Spanish and
Portuguese crowns in 1580 also led to
thousands of Jewish Marranos from
Portugal arriving in Peru, where the
financial opportunities were potentially
great and it was considered to be safe.
Certain customs still maintained by old
families in the region such as the lighting
of candles on Friday nights and sitting on
the ground in mourning when a close
relative dies, suggest Jewish ancestry.
Having endeavoured to escape the
Inquisition at the time of the unification of
the two Iberian crowns, Marrano Jews
soon found themselves in exactly the
same situation with the establishment of
an Inquisition in Lima. In 1570 a letter was
sent to the General Inquisitor referring
specifically to Peru and Chile stating “with
respect to the few Spaniards in these
parts, there are two times as many
converts as in Spain”.

Spain introduced the laws of the Inquisition
to Peru which at the time comprised all its
colonies in South America in 1569.

Grand Inquisitors Francisco Verdugo and
1639 Tribunal of the Inquisition [Auto de la Fé] held in Andrés Juan Gayton both reported at the
Lima
time that “The village of Potosi is so full of
Portuguese…..and generally speaking
they are all from the Hebrew nation, and our experience shows that those who have been
imprisoned by the Inquisition all Judaize and that they now live very cautiously and are no
longer as easily identifiable as before”.

Henry Charles Lea, American historian, wrote in 1908 in his 4 volume body of work ‘The
Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies’ about Portuguese ‘New Christians’: “They
became masters of the commerce of the kingdom; from brocade to sack-cloth, from
diamonds to cumin seed, everything passed through their hands; the Castilian who had
not a Portuguese partner could look for no success in trade.”

1571 is the year world trade was effectively born. It was also the year Manila, in the
Philippines, came into being; the Spanish having created the last link in a maritime
network between the Americas and Asia, previously dominated by their arch rivals the