The Jewish Conquistadors

Read an excerpt from Ed Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, which reveals an unknown chapter in buccaneer lore—the saga of the Iberian Jews who escaped the Spanish Inquisition, set sail for treasure, and seized a New World colony.

At the dawn of the Age of Discovery when Spain’s monarchs banished them to purify and thereby unite their nation, followers of the Law of Moses sailed with the explorers and marched with the conquistadors. With the discovery and settlement of the New World, they took solace in the hope of finding there a haven, or at least putting distance between themselves and the Holy Terror. Unlike other pioneers, they had no “home” to return to and were among the first foreigners to permanently settle the New World. Going about as bona fide Christians, most carried their secret to the grave. The adventures of some who didn’t paint an extraordinary tableau of their time. They include the first Jew burned in the New World and others, men and women, who joined in the conquest of Mexico.

It made no difference if one was a true convert, an atheist, or a covert Jew. All were subject to prosecution.

Heretic Conquistador

Hernando Alonso had it made. Six short years after serving with Cortez as a carpenter’s assistant, “hammering nails into the brigantines used in the recapture of Mexico,” he had become the richest farmer in the new Spanish colony. While most soldiers of his rank received nothing more from the conquest than “the cost of a new crossbow,” Alonso was awarded a large tract of land north of Mexico City. Turning it into a pig and cattle farm, Alonso became the biggest supplier of meat to the colony.

In September, 1528, it was reported that Alonso, now 36, and getting as portly as his beef in emulation of his commander, “swaggered about in a belt of refined gold he had exacted from the natives.” He had good reason: In March, his contract to supply meat to the colony had been renewed by Cortez himself and he had taken a new wife, the “very beautiful” Isabel de Aguilar.

This information on Hernando Alonso comes from the trial records of the Spanish Inquisition. On 17 October 1528, Alonso became the first person in the New World to be burned alive at the stake. Alonso was a Jew, a secret Jew, as was his deceased first wife Beatriz, the sister of Diego Ordaz, one of Cortez’ five captains. His undoing came when a Dominican friar charged that years before in Santo Domingo he had secretly observed Alonso and Beatriz, following their son’s baptismal ceremony, “washing the boy’s head with wine to cleanse him of the Holy Water.” When threatened with torture, Alonso confessed that after the wine ran down the child’s body and “dripped from his organ,” he caught it in a cup and drank it “in mockery of the sacrament of baptism.”

Cortez had no part in the arrest of Alonso. After approving Alonso’s contract, he left for Spain to answer trumped-up charges of misrule. In his absence, a rival faction in the colony conspired with the powers of the Inquisition and introduced the “Holy Terror” to the New World. The holier-than-thou Inquisitors who considered Aztecs savages for sacrificing prisoners to their gods atop their Great Pyramid chose the plaza fronting the site, where a lofty edifice of the True Church had replaced the pyramid, to consign the heretic to the flames.

In a time of carefully arranged marriages, Hernando Alonso would not have married Beatriz Ordaz without the blessing of her brother. Diego Ordaz, one of the outstanding figures of the Conquest, was the first man to climb the volcano Popocatepetl and look upon the Valley of Mexico. Mesmerized by what seemed to be a floating city, he compared it to a vision out of the chivalric tale Amadis de Gaul, the sword and sorcerer book of the time.