A wave of anti-Jewish mob violence that broke out in Seville on 6 June 1391, incited by the archdeacon Ferrand Martinez, and spread through the summer to Cordoba, Toledo, Barcelona, Valencia, Palma and other cities across the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. Jewish quarters were sacked and their residents killed or forced to choose baptism; the violence produced the first mass wave of conversos, Jewish converts to Christianity, whose descendants the Spanish Inquisition would later investigate for suspected secret Judaizing.
Facts
Disputed
Death TollDavid Nirenberg's scholarly account reports a near-contemporary chronicle figure of approximately 4,000 killed in Seville alone, the best-attested single-city figure for the outbreak, not a total across every affected city. Death TollHenry Charles Lea's early twentieth century history gives a widely repeated Castile-wide estimate of fifty thousand victims; later historians regard this as a maximalist figure that contemporary documentation cannot verify, so it is carried here as the historiographical high end rather than the atlas's own preferred total. Mark Meyerson's documented study of Valencia records the near-contemporary claim that some 2,300 of that city's community of 2,500 Jews were killed, illustrating the scale at a single additional city between the two bounds given here. The Event
When It HappenedBeginning 6 June 1391 in Seville, spreading through the summer of 1391 across Castile and Aragon. 1 Victim GroupThe Jewish communities of Castile and Aragon, chiefly Seville, Cordoba, Toledo, Barcelona and Valencia 1 Perpetrator RegimeUrban mobs incited by the archdeacon Ferrand Martinez's anti-Jewish preaching, not a directed state campaign; the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, ruled respectively by the child king Henry III (under regency) and John I, failed to prevent the violence's spread despite prior royal orders against it. 1 Status
Official RecognitionNot formally recognized by any body 1 Predates the modern legal concept of genocide and crimes against humanity by more than five centuries; no international body has ever ruled on it. Recognition BasisDocumented in near-contemporary chronicle sources and treated at length in modern scholarship (Lea 1906, Nirenberg 2014); commemorated in Jewish historical memory as the opening catastrophe of medieval Iberian Jewry's decline rather than recognized by any modern legal or governmental body, five centuries before the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity existed. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
How Many Jews Were Displaced by the 1391 Massacres?
Modern scholarship documents that survivors of the 1391 massacres either converted, often under direct threat, or fled to Islamic-ruled territory, Navarre, Portugal or France, but no source checked gives a reliable numeric total for those who fled distinct from those who converted or were killed. The one round figure found in circulation (a "100,000 fled" alongside equally round conversion and death figures) is inconsistent with the death-toll range already carefully sourced here and was judged unreliable rather than written.
What would resolve this A demographic study of Iberian Jewish community registers or tax rolls before and after 1391, cross-referenced against the destinations named in contemporary accounts (North African, Navarrese and Portuguese Jewish community records), of the kind that has been done for the 1492 expulsion but not, so far as could be found, for 1391 specifically.
Historical demographyDavid Nirenberg, Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (2014)
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