Incident in Messina: Letters of Ferdinand the Catholic concerning Portuguese converses caught on their way to Constantinople

Abstract

Letters written by King Ferdinand the Catholic during his stay in the kingdom of Naples shed Hght on previously little known aspects of his rehgious policy: the efforts directed at the prevention of the flight of conversos to the Ottoman Empire where they could return to Judaism, and the role he assigned to the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily as the guardian of the straits of Messina. The letters also reveal that hundreds of converses escaped from Portugal immediately after the Lisbon massacre, even before the royal edict of March 1507 that allowed them to leave that country. Their arrest in Messina, as well as subsequent incidents involving conversos from the Iberian peninsula on their way to the Levant, indicate that more attention should be paid to Sicily as a country of passage and a frontier of Christendom in the Mediterranean.