Gabriel Sánchez

Origins and early life

Gabriel Sánchez was born in Zaragoza in the middle of the fifteenth century, the son of a Jewish notary of the city who had converted to Christianity — a conversion, the Real Academia de la Historia records, that opened the royal service to his sons — and he belonged to that circle of converso families, the Sánchez, the Santángel, the Caballería, who ran the finances of the Crown of Aragon under Ferdinand the Catholic.

Work and career

He entered the treasury young and became treasurer general of Aragon in 1479, the year Ferdinand succeeded to the throne, and held the office for a quarter of a century, through the war of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews of 1492 and the voyages to the Indies. It is through those voyages that his name survives: he was among the officials who helped find the money for Columbus's first expedition, and it was to him that Columbus addressed, in the spring of 1493, a copy of the letter announcing the islands he had found beyond the ocean — the letter that a Latin translation dedicated to Gabriel Sánchez carried through the presses of Rome, Paris, Basel and Antwerp, so that Europe learned of the New World under his name.

His family paid the price of its origins: when the inquisitor Pedro de Arbués was murdered in the cathedral of Zaragoza in 1485, the conversos of the city were hunted, two of Gabriel's brothers were implicated and one fled the kingdom, and the Inquisition pursued the family for years. He kept the king's confidence and his office to the end, and died in 1505.