from pagan rome to islam and medieval christendom 237
tension between the kings (who needed income from taxes levied from
the Jews), the clergy and the merchant class. On 4 June 1391 anti- Jewish
riots broke out in Seville instigated by the violent sermons of a cleric
named Ferrand Martinez, and the disorder spread throughout the pen-
insula, with the royal authorities powerless to protect the Jews, of whom
many, if they survived, converted.
The number of such conversions in the fifteenth century proved a
problem for Christians as much as Jews, since there was much doubt,
real or imagined, about the genuine Christian faith of these ‘new Chris-
tians’. A desire to purify the state persuaded Isabella and Ferdinand,
monarchs from 1479 of a united kingdom of Castile and Aragon, to
invite the Dominicans to begin an inquisition into ‘Judaizing’ among
such ‘conversos’. The inquisitors seem to have found it impossible to
find such hidden Jews while Jews who openly confessed their faith were
still around. In 1483 Jews were expelled from Andalusia, and in the
autumn of the same year, Tomás de Torquemada was appointed inquisi-
tor general. When Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, fell to
Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1492, the time seemed right to
remove Jews altogether from Spain, and on 31 March 1492 the edict of
expulsion was signed in Granada.^10
Some of the intolerance of Jews had seeped into Catholic Spain from
the Christian communities further north in parts of Europe where Jews
lived in small communities throughout the medieval period. Some Jews
probably settled in northern Catalonia and southern France soon after
70 ce, but evidence for Jewish settlement in France is mostly found
from the fifth century and after, under Frankish and Merovingian kings,
when numbers were increased by refugees from Visigothic Spain. Jews
flourished particularly under Carolingian rule, in the eighth and ninth
centuries, with the establishment in the eleventh century of important
centres of Jewish learning in Limoges, Narbonne and Troyes. The arrival
of Jews in Germany was probably later. There must have been some
Jews in Cologne in 321 ce, when the Roman emperor ruled that they
could be required to serve on the city council. But further Jewish settle-
ment was only gradual, primarily through the arrival of merchants from
Italy and France, like the Kalonymus family from Lucca in Italy, which
settled in Mainz in the tenth century. The peace of both French and Ger-
man communities was shattered during the Crusades. The Crusaders
turned on the Jews of the Rhine valley on the way to the Holy Land
from April to June 1096 in the First Crusade, and more violence fol-
lowed in later Crusades. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council decreed