A broker’s escape: Commercial fraud and the clandestine repatriation of Antonio Enríquez Gómez in 1649

During the war years of the mid‑seventeenth century, Portuguese Jewish merchants in France undertook contraband business in Spain through a Castilian middleman, the poet Antonio Enríquez Gómez (c. 1600–1663), a refugee from the Inquisition who had become an honoured member of the “Portuguese Nation” in Rouen. When, in 1649, the Fronde rebellion in Normandy and a plague in Andalusia generated economic turmoil, Enríquez Gómez dropped out of the Jewish network and transferred his capital to Spain, thereby evading repayment of some substantial loans received from his business associates. While living as a rentier in Granada and Seville under the false name of Don Fernando de Zárate, the poet foiled the parallel efforts undertaken by the Inquisition and his creditors to hunt him down. But even though he also faced unexpected challenges in the form of predatory taxation imposed by King Philip IV, and an unreliable son‑in‑law administering his fortune from Madrid, he felt at leisure to write a vast oeuvre for the theatre, to collect religious paintings and to maintain a young concubine, while still providing for the economic needs of his wife, who had stayed abroad. This study reconstructs the financial arrangements that allowed this successful repatriate to reap the enormous sum of eighty thousand pesos from his capital transfers between two warring kingdoms. As I will conclude from this extraordinary but exemplary case, the ingenious plot developed its own momentum and dictated the twists of its author’s life, which after twelve years in disguise ended in a cell of the Seville Holy Office. The abundant Inquisitorial information on Enríquez Gómez’s business transactions is supplemented by information from notarial deeds discovered in Rouen.