1661. Carta de Basco Pereira, administrador de la renta del tabaco, para su suegro Bartolomé López Telles.

Letter from Basco Pereira, a tobacco revenue administrator, to Bartolomé López Telles, his father-in-law.

The author writes to Bartolomé López Telles, his father-in-law, sending news regarding several matters, businesses and people they have in common. Furthermore, he transcribes text fragments from other people´s letters.

Basco Pereira, of Portuguese origin, was a tobacco revenue administrator. He lived alternately in Ocaña and Toledo and only travelled to Madrid for business matters. Bartolomé López Telles was his father-in-law and lived in Madrid. Basco Pereira often wrote to his father-in-law in order for him to deal with certain work related matters in Madrid. Due to his position, he also kept a correspondence with many other people. Basco Pereira was accused of judaizer and of being an abettor of an observant of the Law of Moses network, reason why he was arrested on the Corpus Christy day in 1661.The letters provided to the process documentation (5 in all) were seized from the defendant himself in the moment he was arrested. The prosecutor´s accusation is based solely in the content of the letters, given they were proof of his role as an abettor and they were written with a double language full of hidden messages. The letters were indeed full of numerous mentions to people with false names or pseudonyms that only the defendant or the addressee could know. It was due to the fact of all of them being judaizers who feared that they could be found out by the Inquisition. The prosecutor also argued that the defendant used the correspondence to support and protect this judaizer network, as can be seen from the alms he was distributing to them through his father-in-law, despite the fact the defendant was not wealthy. Basco Pereira denied all these facts during the interrogation. He tried to defend himself from all the accusations and assured that him and his family were convinced Old Christians. Eventually the defendant was condemned to penance, banishment and to pay 500 ducats for being a heretic. This letter has several annotations and underlined passages making reference to the different names throughout the text. These annotations were made by Holy Office members who tried to find out more about those people and how they related to the defendant. The content of this letter is almost identical to the one in letter PS7016, excepting from a few slightly different details and a change towards the end of it. The letter transcribed in here is longer, what leads us to believe that this is the original from which a copy was made and sent three days later out of fear of the first one getting lost.