Maluku: Between Two Indies

On an April morning in 1646, about a month after he was rendered to the cárcel secreta in Mexico City, the inquisitors summoned Alexo de Castro for his first hearing. Following procedure, they ordered their prisoner to provide his genealogy and discurso de su vida (life-story). As in countless other inquisitorial courtrooms in Iberian jurisdictions across the globe, Alexo produced his “inquisitorial autobiography” under duress in a “coercive legal environment.”Footnote ¹⁸ This was his second such deposition, for in 1623 he had faced an inquisitorial investigation that did not lead to a trial.Footnote ¹⁹ Genealogy weighed at least as heavily in the eyes of the Inquisition as one’s deeds, in consequence of a central contradiction in the religious culture of early modern Spanish imperialism. Although Spanish theological imperialism envisioned the conversion of the entire world, incorporating diverse peoples through conversion into the Spanish imperial order only fomented Iberian anxieties over the sincerity of new converts. New Christians and neophytes were often feared to be apostates who passed as Catholics but who secretly observed their original religion. The shadow of this fear fell not only on moriscos and conversos in Spain, but also on indigenous peoples in America and Chinese Sangleys in Manila, among others.Footnote ²⁰ Genealogy mattered because Spanish notions of casta, or lineage (distinct from the Portuguese concept of endogamous castas in India), assumed that cultural traits and naturaleza (disposition), including those of former religions, passed onward for four generations. In consequence Spaniards “constructed different categories of Christians”—despite Catholic universalist doctrines—by distinguishing between families whose recent ancestors had converted and those of “Old Christians” who “have no memory of conversion,” as one seventeenth-century Spanish author wrote.Footnote ²¹ This meant that Alexo’s account of how his ancestors entered the faith mattered greatly, for it would shape the inquisitors’ evaluations of his life as a professed Christian.Footnote ²² Indeed, Alexo crafted his inquisitorial autobiography in a way that minimised his family’s Muslim past.Footnote ²³ As he recounted his family history, he evoked the central role of conversion and mestizaje in the perilous entanglement of rival local polities with competing foreign powers that had overcome his native island world.

On his mother’s side, Alexo descended from Moluccan royalty, a network of interrelated families who ruled over several island kingdoms in the archipelago. Alexo stated that his maternal ancestors were moros (Muslims) from the island of Bacan, one of the five principal islands that formed the Maluku archipelago.Footnote ²⁴ His mother, who took the name Felipa Deça upon converting to Christianity, was the sister of the king of the island. His uncles married boqui or local noblewomen (boki, daughters of nobles or kolanos), and Alexo identified an uncle as a quichil (kaicili), the title for royal sons. He also stated that he was a close relative of the king of Ternate, part of kinship ties between Bacan and Ternate that went back for generations.Footnote ²⁵ Moluccan royal families were bound to each other through intermarriage, but their inter-island power struggles also led to frequent warfare. The various royal houses managed their rivalries by marrying allies and enemies alike.Footnote ²⁶ Most importantly, Moluccan nobles had to negotiate the rivalry between the prominent islands of Ternate and Tidore, which intensified as they competed in the growing clove trade.Footnote ²⁷ This struggle for a balance of power in the islands shaped Moluccan interactions with foreigners, their strategic reception of Islamic and Christian religions, as well as their resistance against the hegemony of any single native or foreign group over the archipelago.Footnote ²⁸

Alexo’s royal ancestors in Maluku had seen their island world transformed by the arrival of his paternal ancestors, the Iberians. The Portuguese and the Spanish in the sixteenth century were only the latest in a long line of traders who coveted the clove, a spice highly prized for its healing properties but only available in Moluccan microclimates. Chinese, Javanese, Gujeratis, Persians, Arabs, and many others had long plied the sea routes to Maluku, the same routes that the Portuguese followed when they first arrived in 1511.Footnote ²⁹ Taking advantage of inter-island rivalries, the Portuguese sought to control the worldwide distribution of cloves by allying with the Sultan of Ternate. The clove became an apple of discord in the global contest between Spain and Portugal. Spain dispatched Magellan in 1519 to lay claims of its own in Maluku, and the survivors of his expedition received a warm welcome in Tidore, the rival of Ternate. (In an anecdote that the Spanish chronicler Argensola no doubt relished for its irony, the king of Tidore allegedly swore vassalage to the Sacra Cesárea Católica Majestad—His Holy Caesarean Catholic Majesty, Charles V—over the Qur’an.)Footnote ³⁰ Thus, the Ternate-Tidore rivalry mirrored that of the clashing Iberian empires of Spain and Portugal.

The Pacific World of Alexo de Castro. Illustrated by Peter Anthamatten and Daniel Carver.

It is a testament to the new possibilities of travel in the sixteenth-century world that Alexo’s Spanish grandfather, Lorenzo de Castro, arrived in Maluku not along the ancient seaways of Southeast Asia but from America, across the vast and uncharted Pacific Ocean. As if the wealth of Aztec Tenochtitlán were not enough, Spanish colonists in Mexico dreamed of reaching the fabled spices of Maluku. In 1526 Hernán Cortés offered to reduce to “subjugate those islands,” reducing “the natives to recognize and serve your majesty.” A year later he dispatched his cousin, Álvaro de Saavedra, on an expedition to Tidore.Footnote ³¹ This was followed by two more fleets from Mexico: the ill-fated Grijalva expedition of 1537 and the Villalobos fleet, which sailed on orders of Viceroy Mendoza in 1542. All ended in failure: the Saavedra and Villalobos fleets made it to Maluku, but their navigators could not find a return route to Mexico.Footnote ³² The rulers of Tidore allied themselves with the Spanish stragglers and protected them from their Portuguese rivals in Ternate. With no reinforcements arriving from Mexico, however, “the Spanish were more in a position to receive rather than give help.”Footnote ³³ Eventually they either returned to Spain or joined the neighbouring Portuguese. Given that his son described himself as a “Portuguese” resident of Maluku in 1582, we can surmise that Lorenzo de Castro opted for the latter, eventually becoming part of the casados (married men) and moradores (residents)—the community of Portuguese settlers who married local women and used their local kinship ties to profit in the lucrative trade in cloves.Footnote ³⁴

For their part, Moluccan royal families strengthened their commercial and diplomatic ties to Portuguese casados and royal officials through marriage and conversion to Christianity. Moluccan rulers had long “counter-explored” foreigners through their religion: by converting they accessed global trade networks, sealed alliances, and adopted new legal-religious concepts and ceremonial practices that enhanced their authority.Footnote ³⁵ Decades earlier Moluccan rulers had begun to adopt Islam along these lines, and as Portuguese political and commercial influence rose in the sixteenth-century, some prominent members of Moluccan royal families sealed their connections to the Portuguese by converting to Christianity.Footnote ³⁶ In Bacan, conversion was a community-wide process, the result of a rift between Bacan’s ruling family (Alexo’s family) and their powerful relatives in Ternate. The feud drove the ruling family of Bacan to seek a military alliance with the Portuguese.Footnote ³⁷ In 1557, Alexo de Castro’s grandfather, Sultan Siro, sealed this alliance by converting to Christianity and taking the title of Dom João, king of Bacan. With this act, Alexo stated to the Inquisition, the islanders “gave themselves to the Portuguese.” Tellingly, Alexo’s mother took the surname of the highest-ranking Portuguese official in Maluku, Captain Duarte Deça, a clear sign that the captain was her godfather.Footnote ³⁸ After the conversion of the royal family, the newly-converted ruler led a community-wide conversion with the assistance of Jesuit missionaries, a process not unlike the large-scale conversions led by newly-baptised indigenous nobles and Franciscans in post-conquest Mexico.Footnote ³⁹ “In these parts,” a Jesuit who accompanied Dom João wrote, “once the chief of a place becomes Christian there is no difficulty with the others.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Jesuit relations listed the visible signs of Christianisation: the new converts demolished their principal mosque, child-evangelists indoctrinated by Jesuits roamed villages and reported on backsliders, and Dom João himself accompanied the Jesuits to Ambon, where he helped convert several villages.Footnote ⁴¹ The marriage in Bacan of Alexo’s parents, the newly-converted princess Felipa Deça and the “Portuguese” son of a shipwrecked Spaniard, took place in this context of alliance and conversion. Their marriage reflected a broader pattern in Maluku and nearby islands, in which daughters of prominent families married casados.Footnote ⁴²

Nonetheless, this Bacan-Portuguese alliance and its attendant mission enterprise backfired. Rather than securing a safe haven for Bacan, it set off a bitter war that turned Alexo’s newlywed parents into refugees from their relatives in Ternate. When the Portuguese assassinated Sultan Hairun of Ternate in 1570, Hairun’s successor, Baabullah, retaliated by destroying Bacan. His forces sacked the royal palace, kidnapped the king and his son, and razed the Jesuit mission. In their captivity the king and his son renounced Christianity and returned to Islam. (Indeed, Alexo de Castro declared that his mother was the only person in her family who remained a Christian.) Baabullah’s invasion scattered native Christians, missionaries, and Portuguese residents throughout Maluku in a war that ultimately forced the Portuguese to surrender their fortress in Ternate.Footnote ⁴³ This prompted the king of Tidore—no doubt sensing an opportunity to counterbalance his ascendant rivals—to invite the Portuguese to build a fort on his island, which they dedicated to the Reies Magos (Three Kings). Sometime between 1575 and 1580, Alexo de Castro was born in the community of refugees and soldiers who built homes of wood and thatch around this fortress.Footnote ⁴⁴

Like other Portuguese fortress communities in Maluku, Reies Magos occupied a middle ground between an indigenous kingdom and Portuguese overseas networks. Though Portuguese in name, this was a world of multicultural go-betweens and arbitrators.Footnote ⁴⁵ Given that most Portuguese casados and soldados (soldiers) married local indigenous and mestizo women, this was a largely a community of mestizos who lived alongside African slaves, merdikas (Moluccan and South Asian Christians), Portuguese soldiers, lascaris (South Asian mariners), and—after 1582—soldiers from the Philippines, Mexico, and Spain. Mestizo children of Iberians and Moluccan nobles like Alexo maintained kinship ties to their mothers’ indigenous families and served as vital intermediaries between Portuguese (and later, Spanish) officials and native kingdoms. Nonetheless, mestizos adopted a Portuguese identity, speaking a creolised form of Portuguese and adopting European dress. (In Mexico, inquisitors noted that Alexo de Castro could say the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish but switched to Portuguese when he confessed.)Footnote ⁴⁶ Most importantly, Alexo and his fellow mestizos were baptised Christians, a vital marker of legitimacy even here at the antipodes of Iberia.Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite their importance as local intermediaries, many reinóis (Peninsular Portuguese) in Asia disparaged mestizos as inconstant: in the opinion of one Jesuit, they were all too given to the “gentile customs” of their mothers.Footnote ⁴⁸

During Alexo’s childhood in the 1580s, the community at Reies Magos dangled on a thread, dependent on Tidore for provisions and subject to the vicissitudes of Moluccan politics. The rulers of Tidore “tolerated” this community more than they “desired” it.Footnote ⁴⁹ As ever fewer Portuguese ships arrived from Portuguese Malaca, the king of Tidore leveraged his provisioning of the settlement: “several times a year,” a Portuguese captain stated, “they do not fish nor sell us provisions in order to remind us that we are here at [the king’s] pleasure.”Footnote ⁵⁰ So many soldiers and residents became sick and malnourished in 1583 that the Portuguese negotiated a truce with Ternate. That same year, ostensibly to recognize the Union of the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies, Portuguese residents sent desperate pleas to the Spanish colonial administration in Manila to send them provisions and reinforcements. Among these supplicants was Alexo’s father, Juan de Castro.Footnote ⁵¹ Spanish help arrived without effect. Tired of the hunger and poverty in Tidore, a Mexican mestizo soldier crossed over to Ternate and converted to Islam. Several Portuguese soldiers also went renegade.Footnote ⁵² Around the age of thirteen Alexo also opted to leave Tidore, but instead sailed for Portuguese India.Footnote ⁵³

Over the next three decades, Alexo was tossed about in spice wars that dragged in Holland and the Spanish colonies of Philippines and Mexico as additional participants. His mobility is dizzying: after a decade as a soldier in Bengal and Goa, Alexo returned to Tidore with Portuguese forces in 1603 and was among the refugees who fled to the Philippines after Dutch forces burned down Reies Magos in 1605. Alexo then returned as a soldier in the expedition led by Pedro de Acuña in 1606, and alongside Mexican, Andalusian, and Pampangan regiments, he helped conquer Ternate for Spain in 1606.Footnote ⁵⁴ Across the Pacific in Mexico City, the poet Balbuena predicted the final defeat of Islam in Maluku and a prosperous future enriched by its spices.Footnote ⁵⁵ Over the next decade, Alexo served in Spanish garrisons in the archipelago.

Alexo was born into a tenuous frontier world of Portuguese casados, mestizos, merdikas, and slaves, a place where one survived by balancing local ties with Christian affiliation. Despite its dangers, this was a milieu that empowered go-betweens like the Castro’s of Tidore. Alexo’s brother Sebastián, for example, had been “captured” by the Dutch and taken to Holland, where he converted to Calvinism. A decade later, he returned to Maluku, served as an intermediary between Dutch and indigenous polities, and married a “Portuguese” woman, probably a mestiza like himself.Footnote ⁵⁶ Unlike his relatives in Tidore, however, Alexo chose to leave Maluku for a colonial city where his status as a mestizo descendant of Moors took on new and potentially more dangerous meanings.

Manila: A Divided Home in the Hispano-Asian Cosmopolis

Around the year 1617, Alexo de Castro settled in Manila to live with his wife, Ynés de Lima, whom he had married some six years earlier. Alexo took up a post as a soldier in the imposing Fort Santiago, which guarded the Spanish walled city (intramuros) and its barrios extramuros, or “outside the walls.” Alexo and Ynés resided in San Antón, a neighbourhood between the Chinese Parián, the busy centre of Manila’s commercial activity, and the Japanese barrio of Dilao, which in those years was populated by Christian refugees from Tokugawa repression.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Castro home was likely of local caña y nipa design, a wood-and-palm structure that, in this low-lying area near the Pasig River, was probably on stilts.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Castro-Lima household reflected the global intermingling of peoples that unfolded on a daily basis in the bustling city outside its palm-frond walls. According to Inquisition records, Ynés de Lima was “of the Bengali caste,” the daughter of Asian Christians who, like Alexo, were mobile and spoke Portuguese. Alexo and Ynés’ daughter, Felipa de Lima, first married a soldier from Mexico City; after he died she married a soldier from Seville. Ynés also owned a slave named María de Lima, who called herself a criolla or native of Manila. Her origin is unknown; Alexo and the inquisitors merely described her as negra (black), which does little to clarify the matter.Footnote ⁵⁹ Theirs was a bitterly divided home. Over the course of thirty years, Alexo’s wife, daughter, and female servants testified that Alexo had continuously abused and raped them. As Alexo’s victims sought redress in their private lives, they framed their arguments in the discourses and divisions that were present in the public life of this global and colonial city: in its caste hierarchies, its religious anxieties, and frontier geopolitics.

Manila was the cosmopolis of the Hispano-Asian Pacific world, for it was at once a transpacific emporium and a city that proclaimed imperial and evangelical ambitions. Founded by Spaniards in 1571 over the charred ruins of the Muslim port of Maynilad, Manila transformed global commerce by linking the recently discovered silver wealth of Spanish America with the commercial networks of China and the Indian Ocean. Yet this city was not solely a global entrepôt, for Spanish clergymen and administrators intended to channel Manila’s lucrative commerce to a higher purpose. Above all, Manila was supposed to be a Christian city, a “Rome of the East” destined to extend Christianity outward into Asia along the very same trade routes that converged there.Footnote ⁶⁰ Commerce, colonialism, and religion brought migrants of all kinds to Manila. “There is hardly a kingdom, province, or nation,” a Franciscan friar wrote, “whose people are not present here, due to the regularity of their navigations from the East, West, South, and North;” a Jesuit went so far as to complain that the confessional in polyglot Manila was the “most difficult in the world.”Footnote ⁶¹

This global diversity existed in tension with the religious exclusivism of Spanish colonial politics. As in the rest of the empire, officials intended Catholicism to be the sole religion under Spanish sovereignty; all ethnic and cultural diversity was to be subsumed under the Faith. Nonetheless, the vulnerability of this Spanish colony in Asia, as well as the vital importance of global commerce to the city’s success, also required a modicum of religious coexistence, however begrudging. Manila’s economy could not survive without the thousands of infiel (“infidel,” non-Christian) Chinese Sangley tradesmen and merchants who formed the largest recognised community of non-Christians in the Spanish Empire.Footnote ⁶² In Manila the exclusivist ‘Rome of the East’ coexisted with the pluralistic transpacific emporium that enriched it. This was a city where Alexo felt comfortable enough to speak openly about his moro (Moorish, Muslim) origins and his on-going contacts with Muslims (a far more delicate matter for new Christians elsewhere), yet it was also a city whose hegemonic politics of Catholic exclusion gave Alexo’s victims the tools to get him arrested. Embedded in the Castro household, then, were the very tensions of convivencia (living-together) in Manila’s multicultural society.

In this city whose majority consisted of natives of the Philippine Islands, foreigners, and mestizos, an emerging system of social exclusion and inclusion based on casta (caste) and conversion status developed from the interaction between transpacific influences of colonial Mexico and local cross-cultural relations. The global scale of mestizaje in Manila defied categorization. In 1589, a recently-arrived Spanish missionary reported to his brethren in Mexico that “I could go on forever differentiating peoples” from far and near, “[but] of the mestizos I cannot even write, because in Manila there is no limit to the combinations of peoples with peoples.”Footnote ⁶³ A century later, the traveller Gemelli Careri reported that mestizaje had produced “such differences in color” that manileños had to differentiate castas (mixed-race people) with “ridiculous names.” The subcategories that he listed were similar to those in Mexico.Footnote ⁶⁴ The caste hierarchy assigned status according to the proportion of Spanish blood, thereby privileging the tiny Spanish minority and encouraging them to marry either a mestiza or one the few Spanish-born women in the city. (Spanish females were so few, in fact, that in 1621 Spanish males “loudly protested” the cloistering of half of Manila’s potential Spanish wives in the newly-founded Convent of the Poor Clares.)Footnote ⁶⁵ Next below Spaniards were mestizos with a European parent like Alexo (although many were considered illegitimate due to widespread concubinage among Spanish officials). Following the mestizos came indigenous Filipinos (indios), Chinese mestizos (mestizos de sangley, of Chinese-Filipino intermarriage), Asian migrants, and Chinese.Footnote ⁶⁶ For his part, Alexo claimed a higher position in the caste system than his Bengali wife and suegros (in-laws), for one priest testified that Alexo was frequently overheard calling them cafres—Black Africans, a term associated with slavery.Footnote ⁶⁷ Given their caste and gender, then, the female members of the Castro household were doubly marginalised in Manila’s hierarchies of power.

In order to police the Christian faith in this city so close to the heresies and idolatries of Asia, the Mexican Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition established a local branch in Manila. Under the direction of a comisario (commissary), who in turn presided over a network of local familiares (correspondents), the Manila Inquisition claimed jurisdiction over all East Asia, and it gathered information on suspected apostates as far away as Ternate and Nagasaki. In practice, however, it was a thinly-spread, weak institution. Its agents in Manila mainly paid attention to the city’s abusive priests and foreign population.Footnote ⁶⁸ Inquisition officials also inspected incoming vessels for illegal books or non-Christian idols—on one occasion, a comisario embargoed a Chinese vessel in Cavite for attempting to import images of Chinese gods, as well as a stack of Protestant bibles acquired from Dutch merchants in Siam.Footnote ⁶⁹ They also issued edicts that informed the populace to be vigilant for crimes against the faith, such as the 1626 edict issued in Manila against crypto-Muslims. With some alarm, the comisario reported to Mexico that a man from Ternate had been seen performing magic rites with papers written in Arabic letters, and that a woman had been found writing Arabic phrases on palm leaves.Footnote ⁷⁰

Cases such as these rarely led to trial, however, because Inquisition procedure required comisarios to report their initial investigations to Mexico City. If the Mexican Tribunal found a case was worth pursuing, they then directed the comisario to send the prisoner to Mexico City for trial. The entire process was therefore subject to the whims and waits of transpacific communications. Accordingly, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Spain stated that “due to distance” the comisario in Manila should “reduce the incarceration of prisoners [and] release them on bail after concluding the investigation.”Footnote ⁷¹ Alexo was an example of this, for on three occasions he had faced grave accusations without the investigation ever proceeding to a full trial. In 1623, he freely admitted that he “deals frequently with Moors but does not attend their ceremonies” and he was candid about the fact that he maintained a close friendship with his relative, the Muslim king of Ternate (of the same family that had destroyed his mother’s kingdom), who was imprisoned in Manila for two decades following the Spanish conquest of that island 1606. Nonetheless, the Manila inquisitors released him with only an admonishment to see his confessor on a regular basis.Footnote ⁷² For Manila’s busy and overstretched inquisitors, Alexo’s contacts with his royal Muslim kin raised no alarms.

Thus Alexo was no victim of an inquisitorial dragnet against suspected heretics; instead, it was his own family members who brought accusations against him on three or four occasions over a thirty-year period.Footnote ⁷³ The troubles began with differences over Ynés’ dowry. Neighbours reported the frequent shouting, which spiralled into physical and sexual abuse. Matters reached the point where Ynés de Lima initiated a divorce trial in the Archdiocese, which ended ambivalently—the parties were allowed to live separately but were later “encouraged by friends and neighbours in San Antón to reunite,” according to an archdiocesan secretary.Footnote ⁷⁴ The abuse continued. Felipa, Alexo’s thirteen year-old daughter, bravely explained to inquisitors that Alexo had repeatedly fondled and raped her; on one occasion at the king of Ternate’s residence, she stated, the king himself had intervened to protect her.Footnote ⁷⁵ Twenty years later, María de Lima, Ynés’ slave, reported a similar pattern of violence. María painfully recalled that Alexo sought to have sex with her, arguing that this was “not a sin” since “even priests do this after they say mass.” Eventually he raped her.Footnote ⁷⁶ For her part, Ynés confirmed María’s testimony and added that Alexo had done this to several other servants in the household as well—for this reason, in fact, Ynés left Alexo and took María with her to live separately from her husband.Footnote ⁷⁷ This pattern of abuse itself was of little concern to inquisitors: the comisario who heard Felipa’s testimony merely stated that Alexo seemed “not well-suited for his wife and is rather melancholic,” while the comisario who heard María’s accusation gave little credit to her testimony since “she is a slave who frequently escaped.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Since the comisario found no material motive for Ynés and María’s accusations, it appears most likely that Ynés, Felipa, and María de Lima repeatedly denounced Alexo before the Inquisition in order to put an end to his abuses and remove him definitively from their lives.Footnote ⁷⁹ Twenty years after her first attempt, Ynés tried again in 1643. Together with María de Lima, she approached the imposing Dominican parish church in Binondo and gave an accusation that specifically associated Alexo with Islam and the moros of Maluku. Both women claimed that they had seen Alexo prostrate himself in his home on Fridays, whispering prayers as he faced different directions. Inquisitors identified this as the çala (Salat), the Muslim rite of veneration. No doubt aware that as a woman she was a legal minor under Spanish law and therefore needed a male—preferably a Spaniard—to vouch for her story, Ynés secured corroborative testimony from Germán de Espinosa, her Spanish son-in-law.Footnote ⁸⁰ In her testimony, Ynés pressed her argument by associating Alexo with Ternate, not Tidore or his Christian mother’s island of Bacan. Alexo remained in contact with Muslims, she declared, and his mother was a mora terrenata—a Moor of Ternate.Footnote ⁸¹ In so doing, Ynés tarnished Alexo’s Christian identity by associating him with the island that had wreaked the most havoc on Spanish imperial and religious designs in Maluku, where so much Filipino, Mexican, and Spanish blood had been shed.

The comisario who weighed the testimonies for and against Alexo de Castro was Fray Domingo González, a well-regarded Dominican who for decades had helped missionaries in Asia resolve their most intractable moral dilemmas.Footnote ⁸² The Castro file had him on the fence. The friar took little interest in the women’s accusations of abuse, save for María’s comment that Alexo had claimed that sex outside of marriage was not a sin and that even priests knew and acted upon this. Instead, his problem regarded the reliability of two non-European women: Ynés and María’s testimonies, he wrote to the Mexican inquisitors, were “of little quality.” Ynés was a “good Christian,” but she was “a Bengali Indian or of some similar caste,” which diminished her credibility. María, meanwhile, was a merely slave “who always fled” her owners. Inquisitors tended to give little credence to women’s testimonies, particularly those of low status, due to the alleged traits of their gender and casta.Footnote ⁸³ Thus, although he also had misgivings about the two Spaniards who testified, González nonetheless stated that “these two Spaniards are the most aware and virtuous [people] who live in the pueblo of San Antón”—no doubt a reference to the majority of presumably less-virtuous foreigners, indigenous, and mestizos who lived there. In the end, it was Alexo’s own origin that tipped the balance: Alexo was just the “son of a Moorish woman of Ternate,” which along with his “life as a bad Christian” was enough to presume that he was a crypto-Muslim. By securing a Spaniard’s testimony and by associating Alexo with a Moorish genealogy, Ynés and María placed just enough doubt in the mind of the Dominican Order’s foremost theologian in Manila. Erring on the side of caution, González sent Alexo to Mexico for a full trial and placed him on the galleon bound for Acapulco just days after his arrest in 1645.Footnote ⁸⁴

Mexico City: In the Dungeon of a Colonial Metropolis

Roughly a century after his grandfather had left Mexico for Maluku, Alexo de Castro arrived there in chains, having survived a perilous seven-month voyage from Manila. It was his misfortune to fall into the hands of the Mexican Tribunal of the Holy Office precisely at a moment when inquisitors were prosecuting alleged apostates at a fever pitch. The cárcel secreta (secret prison) was a dark reflection of the colonial metropolis beyond its walls; crowding its dank adobe cells were transgressors and alleged enemies of the faith from all continents, as well as numerous victims of political and commercial rivalries. Alexo’s prison-mates included Protestant heretics, blaspheming Angolan slaves, abusive priests, peyote users, mulata sorcerers, errant scholars, false priests, fortune-tellers, two Berber Muslims, and even an Irishman who had sought to overthrow the colonial regime and crown himself King of Mexico.Footnote ⁸⁵ Of greatest relevance to Alexo de Castro’s trial, however, was the largest group in this crowded prison: hundreds of Portuguese New Christians languished in this prison and faced charges of ‘Judaizing’ and conspiring against the colonial regime.Footnote ⁸⁶ This repressive campaign against New Christians, which unfolded against the backdrop of a deepening imperial crisis, shaped the arguments in Alexo’s trial.

The persecution of Portuguese New Christians in Mexico was by no means an isolated event, for it formed part of a broader crisis in political and commercial networks throughout the Spanish Empire. The Braganza Revolt in Portugal against Spanish rule in 1640 brought an end to the sixty-year union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns—the very Union that Alexo’s “Portuguese” father had welcomed at his neglected fortress in Tidore. For six decades, the Union of the Crowns allowed Portuguese New Christian merchants to establish themselves in Spanish America and the Philippines with ease, much to the chagrin of merchants based in Seville. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities, rival merchant houses, and widespread popular opinion associated the Portuguese New Christians with crypto-Judaism, and many warned that this globally-connected “Portuguese Nation” of merchants would undermine the empire’s political and religious foundation.Footnote ⁸⁷ The revolt in Portugal only intensified these tensions. In Mexico, inquisitors claimed to have uncovered a New Christian conspiracy, which they called la gran complicidad. The theory equated Portuguese New Christians with crypto-Jews, and it alleged that they were plotting to overthrow Spanish colonial rule. “Mexico City and New Spain was boiling over with Hebrews,” the inquisitor Pedro de Estrada y Escobedo wrote, “[because] hiding their perfidy with continuous lies, on the exterior they imitated Catholic acts.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In the arrests that followed, over 150 New Christians were imprisoned, including Mexico’s wealthiest merchants, whose assets proved to be a bonanza for Mexico’s cash-strapped Holy Office.Footnote ⁸⁹ This persecution also crossed the Pacific. It reached Jorge de Montoya in Manila, who fled to Macau after hearing that his brother in Mexico City had been arrested. Montoya’s effigy was burned in Mexico City; the Holy Office eventually arrested him in Goa.Footnote ⁹⁰ In Pampanga, north of Manila, the corregidor (district governor and judge) Antonio Váez de Azevedo, who had relatives in Mexico and the Caribbean, was arrested and brought to Mexico in 1648.Footnote ⁹¹

The gran complicidad influenced Alexo de Castro’s arguments and self-portrayal as well as the evaluative procedures by which the inquisitors arrived at their conclusions. Alexo apparently learned of the campaign against Portuguese New Christians during his first weeks in prison, for in his first hearing he disassociated himself from his own Portuguese connections. Given that Alexo provided his inquisitorial autobiography in two different times and places, the importance of the immediate political and social context in shaping each deposition is clearly evident.Footnote ⁹² Whereas in 1623 in Manila he had declared his father to be Portuguese (which matched his father’s own autobiography in 1583), in Mexico he stated that his father was a Spaniard “who came to the Philippines with the adelantado (frontier captain) Legazpi.”Footnote ⁹³ Given that Portuguese inhabitants were closely associated with Jewishness in 1640s Mexico, accordingly Alexo revised his autobiography by erasing his Portuguese connections as much as possible.

In contrast, the inquisitors directly associated Alexo with the New Christians through the bodily signs of circumcision that Jews and Muslims shared. When inquisitors ordered a full bodily examination, a surgeon determined that Alexo had a “latitudinal mark that seems to have been made with a sharp instrument, as has also been seen in the other prisoners here in the complicidad.” In particular, Alexo’s scar tissue looked like that of Pedro de Castro, a prisoner recently found guilty for Judaizing, “who was circumcised among the nation of Jews.” The inquisitors and the surgeon agreed that this similarity with crypto-Jews proved that Alexo indeed had been circumcised “according to the various rites of his [Muslim] sect and of those who profess it.” Alexo vehemently denied these claims.Footnote ⁹⁴

For the inquisitors, Alexo’s circumcision suggested that his Moorish genealogy had indeed shaped his upbringing, thus laying the basis for his life as a false Christian. According to Spanish concepts of limpieza de sangre (blood-purity), the traits of infidel religion passed on for several generations, and Alexo’s circumcision served as proof that Alexo’s mother was a false convert and had passed her Islamic religion to her son. Following Ynés de Lima’s allegations, the inquisitors declared that Alexo was “the son of a mora (Moorish woman) of Ternate.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In contrast, Alexo’s narrative was a familiar one in colonial Mexico: he stressed that his mother had become a Christian during a community-wide conversion that coincided with Bacan’s submission to a Christian monarch.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, in his 1623 deposition, he had referred to his mother as an india de Tidore (indigenous woman from Tidore) who rejected Islam, a line of argument that was similar to the opinions of some Spaniards that indios (natives) in Southeast Asia were so new to Islam that they were still more gentiles—which the term indio implied—than committed moros de naturaleza (Moors by birth and disposition).Footnote ⁹⁷ Such nuance and attention to context was far from this courtroom. “Alexo has the evil sect of Mohammed ... deeply rooted in his tortured soul,” the inquisitors declared, “[which he] inherited from his elders, who were moros by birth.”Footnote ⁹⁸ This laid the basis for his life as a false Christian: infidelity coursed through his life, leading to decisions to avoid his Christian obligations, to speak heresies, and to secretly follow the religion of his mother’s ancestors.Footnote ⁹⁹ The prosecutor pushed his argument: “one can presume,” he declared, that Alexo was indeed a Muslim who has “done and said many more crimes.” He then asked that Alexo be “relaxed to the secular arm”—to be executed in an auto-de-fé.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

After the prosecutor made his case, Alexo had the opportunity to speak. Assuming correctly that Ynés de Lima had denounced him, he launched a misogynistic attack against her, claiming that she was simply trying to acquire his property (the Inquisition reported that he had none) and that she had been rounding up witnesses in San Antón to testify against him. He also decried an inquisitorial process that had brought him to a land so distant, where it was impossible to summon other witnesses to his defence.Footnote ¹⁰¹ His main counter-argument, however, turned away from personal and procedural matters and directly addressed the logic of the accusations made against him. Had he wished to be a Muslim, he argued, it surely would have been easier for him to simply remain in his homeland where “his relatives are kings and princes, marrying a mora instead of a Catholic Christian.” Had he wished to be a Muslim, he would not have spent sixty-five years “fighting Moors and infidels,” and he would not have “taken arms against his own people on behalf of a [foreign] king of a different religion.” Therefore “one cannot presume” that he had “slipped back” to Islam simply because he was a descendant of a Muslim. Given the choice, he had chosen to live among Christians and fight for them, and he believed that his decision and his life experience should weigh heavier than his genealogy.Footnote ¹⁰² His argument reflects those of other new Christians throughout the Spanish Empire who articulated an inclusive view of the Christian body politic in order to end discrimination against them.Footnote ¹⁰³

Alexo’s fate is a testament to the stigma of his mestizo genealogy. Solely out of consideration for his age, the inquisitors sentenced Alexo to permanent exile from the Philippines in lieu of execution, and he had to renounce his crimes against the faith in the auto particular de fé, or a small-scale Auto-de-Fé, held at the Jesuit church, or casa profesa, on March 30, 1648. For the embattled Mexican Inquisition, the event was one of a series autos-de-fé that sought to demonstrate its power. Holding green candles and wearing the tunics of penitents, Alexo joined several dozen other condemned prisoners, including several alleged crypto-Jews and a mulata healer who had used profits from her practice of sorcery to purchase her enslaved husband’s freedom. After the long journey from Manila, two years in prison, and the prosecutor’s dire warnings, Alexo only had to perform the lightest abjuration, the abjuración de levi.Footnote ¹⁰⁴