Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva

Origins and early life

Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva was born about 1537 at Mogadouro in Portugal to Gaspar de Carvajal and Catalina de León, New Christians of Jewish origin — a family forcibly converted in Portugal and later settled in Spain.

Work and career

He himself lived and died a professing Catholic, and this fiche states that plainly, as it states the fact recorded in the Inquisition's own archives: his sister Francisca, her husband and their children secretly kept the Jewish faith, and his nephew Luis de Carvajal the Younger, who has his own fiche here, was burned for it in 1596. He served the crown in the Cape Verde islands and as an admiral against the English, and in 1579 King Philip II granted him the government of a vast new territory, the Nuevo Reino de León, stretching from Tampico into what is now Texas, with the exceptional privilege of bringing a hundred settlers without the customary proof of clean Christian blood — a clause that allowed him to bring his own extended family and other New Christians to the New World.

He founded settlements including the one that became Monterrey, opened silver mining in the north, and was the first Spanish subject documented to have crossed the Rio Grande northward into Texas. But he also enslaved Indians in defiance of the crown's law, which brought him enemies, and in 1589 the Inquisition arrested him. He was tried not for Judaizing but for concealing the Judaism of his relatives, above all of his niece Isabel Rodríguez, whom he knew to have returned to the faith of her ancestors and did not denounce; he was convicted in February 1590 and sentenced to six years' exile. He died in his cell in Mexico City on 13 February 1591 before the sentence could be carried out.