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CHAPTER VIII THE MARRANO DIASPORA THE most natural method by which the Peninsula could have been purged of the taint of disbelief, at the period of the introduction of the Holy Office and after, was obviously by encouraging those persons who refused to conform to the dominant faith to emigrate. This simple expedient would have been at variance with the ideals of the period. Had the recent converts been allowed to revert to their ancestral beliefs and practices, their souls would have been endangered, and all the work of recent years would have been wasted. Heresy was, moreover, in contemporary eyes a positive crime—indeed the greatest of all crimes; and to permit persons guilty of it to go unscathed was no more to be thought of than to allow deliberately a thief or a murderer to escape from justice. A secondary consideration, though by no means without its weight, was that flight would have robbed the Holy Office of the confiscations and profits which must have followed upon condemnation. Hence, a logical consequence of the general policy which was adopted towards the New Christians was to keep them in the country at all costs. Accordingly, in the period following upon the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain, orders were continually issued prohibiting emigration on the part of the conversos, and imposing heavy fines, of as much as five hundred florins, on persons conveying them. In 1499, the Archbishop of Messina issued an order that no ship-cap195
