Fernán Díaz de Toledo

Origins and early life

Fernán Díaz de Toledo, known to his age simply as 'el Relator', was a Jew of Toledo by birth — the sources preserve his Hebrew name, Mose Hamomo — who converted to Christianity in the years of mass conversion after 1391 and rose to become, in the words of the Spanish historians, the most eminent of the judeoconverso servants of John II of Castile.

Work and career

Trained in law, he was relator of the royal council, the officer who reported cases and drafted the king's decisions, and also oidor of the audiencia, notary major of privileges and secretary; for three decades, through the ascendancy of Álvaro de Luna and the civil wars of the reign, few documents of the Castilian crown passed without his hand, and his testament of 1455, studied by historians at Seville, shows a man of great wealth and greater connections.

His moment came in 1449, when the rebels of Toledo issued the Sentencia-Estatuto, the first purity-of-blood statute, barring all descendants of Jews from public office. The Relator answered with his Instrucción, addressed to Bishop Lope de Barrientos: a demonstration, name by name, that the noblest houses of Castile — and the king's own council, and the bishops themselves — were full of converso blood, that the Church had never distinguished between old and new Christians, and that to do so was heresy against the unity of baptism.

It was the first great plea for the conversos, taken up by Barrientos and by Alonso de Cartagena and condemned by Pope Nicholas V in the same year, and it lost: the statutes spread across Spain for three centuries. He died around 1457.