Antonio Enríquez Gómez

Origins and early life

Antonio Enríquez Gómez was born around 1600 in Cuenca, into a converso family of Portuguese origin — Jews forcibly converted to Christianity — that the Inquisition had persecuted for generations — the Encyclopaedia Judaica traces the genealogy; his father was tried for Judaizing.

Work and career

A merchant and a soldier who became a poet and a playwright, he wrote comedies for the stage of Madrid that were sometimes taken for Calderón's, and satirical verse that has kept its bite. In 1636, as the Holy Office closed in, he fled to France — Bordeaux, Rouen, Paris — and in exile wrote his most personal works, including the Academias morales and, in the Pythagorean Century, a portrait of the Inquisition's Spain from the outside.

Then he did the unthinkable: around 1649 he returned in secret to Seville under a false name, Fernando de Zárate, and went on writing plays for the Spanish stage while the Inquisition burned him in effigy in 1660, believing him abroad.

Later years

He was recognized and arrested in 1661, and died in the Inquisition's prison in Seville on 19 March 1663, before his trial ended — his identity as the vanished exile reconstructed by scholars only in the twentieth century.