Being the Nação in the Eternal City: New Christian Lives in Sixteenth-Century Rome by James W. Nelson Novoa (review)

When a recent Syrian immigrant to Sweden was asked by a reporter whether, if peace returned, he would ever want to go back to Syria, he replied that no, he was in fact a Palestinian refugee in Syria and now all he wanted to do was settle down for good and become a Swedish citizen. The many flights and multiple identities of a contemporary Middle Easterner recall the complicated early modern history of the Jews of Portugal, a chapter of which is here painstakingly excavated by James W. Nelson Novoa. His book focuses on second generation conversos or New Christians, children of Jewish parents who were forced by the King of Portugal to convert to Christianity in 1497, or flee. Nelson Novoa’s subjects faced a later moment of crisis, when, their “real” Christianity in doubt, they once again had to choose to remain in Portugal or go elsewhere, notably in this case, to the seat of Catholicism. The new threat, again delivered by the Crown, was the establishment of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Portugal in 1531 with a brief that targeted New Christians who allegedly remained secret Jews. Against the background of denunciations, trials, and burnings, six men of Portuguese New Christian origin immigrated to Rome between 1532 and 1560; Nelson Novoa tells their stories.

The Portuguese were already an established community in a city that expected to welcome not only transient visitors but also foreigners who would put down long roots. So one possibility for the newly arrived New Christians would be to join the Portuguese church and confraternity, and take advantage of its charitable institutions. But it’s clear that most of Nelson Novoa’s men were in Rome to make a living, indeed to make a career. Some of the ways they did so were as brokers for the New Christians back in Portugal, bankers to the Curia, or clerics working their way up the ecclesiastical ranks. Settling down to found Roman families was not necessarily a goal for all of them, however, and some moved on when opportunities in the Eternal City dried up.

A great merit of this study is its demonstration of the diversity of aims and strategies of sixteenth-century individuals notwithstanding their common origins. Duarte de Paz is the stuff of fiction, a swashbuckling soldier who took on the assignment for the New Christians back in Portugal of getting the pope to quash the Inquisition tribunal, and almost succeeded. Nelson Novoa’s reconstruction of Paz’s efforts shows that in the 1530s everything in the Curia was for sale; the New Christians in Portugal counted on this fact and pumped money into Rome via Paz to mitigate the Portuguese king’s punishing legislation. Like all systems of influence, this was precarious, and ultimately fell apart with a change of curial personnel and with suspected embezzlement by Paz himself. But Paz proved to be a Mediterranean personality, seeking his fortune at other Italian courts as well as with the Ottoman sultan and professing serially all three Mediterranean religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

In sharp contrast to this trickster figure was the merchant banker Antonio da Fonseca, though he too demonstrated an admirable capacity to trim his sails to the winds of power. Unlike Paz Fonseca, who arrived in the late 1550s, he avoided involvement with New Christians in Rome, but went out of his way to cultivate leading Portuguese officials in the city. As a successful financier, Fonseca became an invaluable source of loans to many of them, and they likely lubricated his ascent in the expatriate community. He ended up as a lay official managing the finances of the Portuguese confraternity and hospice. From a super-Catholic Portuguese banker Fonseca shifted seamlessly to a super-Spanish Portuguese banker when the kingdom fell to Philip II of Spain in 1581. These choices made it possible for Fonseca...