How slender was the evidence required when a Portuguese was concerned is seen in another case at Valladolid. When the inquisitor Pedro Múñoz made a visitation of Oviedo in 1619-20, two women testified that Lucía Núñez, a Portuguese settled in Benavente, put on clean chemises on Saturdays. When, March 5, 1620, the tribunal voted on the cases brought in by Múñoz, this was suspended, but the Suprema ordered the papers to be sent to it and, on August 17, 1621, it instructed the tribunal to arrest Lucía and sequestrate her property. She was accordingly brought to Valladolid, October 30, 1621, and thrown into the secret prison. On her first audience, in reply to the ordinary question whether she knew the cause of her arrest, she said that it was because she changed her linen on Fridays and Saturdays, as she did every day, for the sake of cleanliness, especially when she was suckling her children, and she did not know that she was committing any offence. It was true that she was born in Portugal, but both her parents were Castilians and Old Christians. The trial went through its regular course; nothing else could be found against her and, on March 15, 1622, the consulta de fe voted to acquit her and lift the sequestration, which was done accordingly the next day, after nearly five months of incarceration.[809]
When this kind of work was on foot throughout Spain, it is easy to realize how the unfortunate Portuguese were tracked, from one refuge to another, by the implacable vigilance of the Inquisition, with its net-work of tribunals, in constant correspondence, and its commissioners and familiars everywhere on the watch. That vigilance was kept alive by the frequent discovery of communities of Judaizers, more or less numerous, whose trials revealed the names of abundant accomplices. The tribunal of Llerena was busy, from 1635 to 1638, with the "complicidad de Badajoz," a group of Portuguese, whom it had unearthed at Badajoz and, when the Suprema called for a list of those inculpated by the prisoners, whom it had not been able to arrest, they amounted to a hundred and fifty.[810]
In 1647, Juan del Cerro, of Ciudad Rodrigo, was a prisoner in the royal gaol of Valladolid. Apparently hoping for release, he denounced himself to the Inquisition and told a story of a congregation of Jews at Ciudad Rodrigo, which met every Friday in the house of the president, Pablo de Herrera, paymaster of the army on the Portuguese frontier, when the ceremony of scourging images of Christ and the Virgin was performed and then, during Holy week, they were burnt. Numerous arrests were made and the trials dragged on until 1651; torture was employed, parents and children, brothers and sisters testified against each other, but there were no pertinacious impenitents or negativos and none were relaxed. That Juan del Cerro's story of the outrages on the sacred images was recognized as fictitious is evident from the suspension of ten of the cases, including those of the so-called officers of the congregation, but the tribunal secured a satisfactory number of convictions, as well as fines amounting to thirty-seven hundred ducats. Juan del Cerro made nothing by his device for, though he was not prosecuted for false-witness, when the trials were over in 1651, he was handed back to the royal court.[811] Toledo was equally active for, in an auto held the same year, it had thirty-two Judaizers in person and thirty effigies of fugitives.[812] Nearly the whole of these were Portuguese for, by this time, Castilian Judaizers were of comparatively rare occurrence. In the great Seville auto of 1660, out of eighty-one Judaizers, nearly all Portuguese, a group of thirty-seven were from Osuna and another of eight from Utrera. There were forty-seven reconciled, seven relaxed in person and twenty-seven in effigy.[813]