Syntactic Trees

Private letter from Fernão Rodrigues de Trancoso, friar, to Dom João Telo de Meneses, Portuguese ambassador in Rome.

The author asks the recipient to forward two letters to the Inquisition in Lisbon.

The Inquisition archives contain, apart from the around 40 thousand individual proceedings ("processos"), a collection of scattered charges, for which the Inquisition "Promotor" had to decide whether or not to prosecute. Complaints, confessions, letters by the commissioners or about different stages of each proceedings are some of the document types that can be found in these books. This letter has been kept among such documentation.

These three letters (PSCR0073, PSCR0074 and PSCR0075) are related to Mira Charavola, a Jewish woman who met the Portuguese friar Fernão Rodrigues de Trancoso in Northern Italy. She asked this friar to write a letter to her husband, António Rodrigues, who had the Jewish name Judá Barroca and had traveled to Portugal to bring his family with him to Italy. The mentioned friar, however, betrayed her, denouncing her and her husband to the Portuguese Inquisition.