De Portugal às Minas do Ouro: a trajetória do cristão-novo Diogo Nunes Henriques (1670-1729)

Abstract

This work aims to analyze Diogo Nunes Henriques’s trajectory, a Portuguese New Christian and businessman who lived in Castile and in different locations of the Portuguese Empire, until he finally settled in Minas Gerais, a Brazilian colonial territory. Part of a family whose other members had already been judged by the Holy Office, Henriques found a strong ally on the migratory movements to escape from the sight of the Inquisitors. In the colonial Atlantic captaincies, Diogo became a promising merchant, secured by a social network that involved Old Christians, relatives and other New Christians who were also traders. However, the relative commercial success did not erased the New Christian’s blood stain, nor Henriques’, neither his companions’, who were all accused of committing the Judaism crime and then denounced and arrested by the Holy Office in the first half of the eighteenth century. The New Christians in the Portuguese Empire were inserted in a paradoxal context: on one hand they were vassals of a crown increasingly dependent on the ultramarine trade; on the other hand they were subjected to the coercive actions performed by the Holy Office, an institution more and more dedicated to eliminating the Jewish heresy from the Portuguese Empire. Analyzing trajectories such as the one of Diogo Nunes Henriques helps in the pursuit for understanding the social reality experienced by New Christians towards the Portuguese Holy Office’s intolerance policies and its deployments.