The Lisbon Massacre: three days of killing in April 1506

On the afternoon of Sunday 19 April 1506, the first Sunday after Easter, the church of the Dominican convent of São Domingos was full. Lisbon was in the grip of plague, and for days people had crowded into a side chapel, the Chapel of Jesus, where they said the crucifix above the altar gave off a strange light.3 sources3 sources

A German then in the city went to look. He saw nothing, but about 200 people, many of them friends he trusted, told him they had seen lights and gilded stars shining around the crucifix. He asked them whether it might be a trick by the friars, which would be easy to set up. All of them said it was a true sign from God.1 source1 source

Some New Christians were in the church that Sunday, among them a man who said aloud what many suspected, that the miracle was a fraud. Damião de Góis, the royal chronicler, wrote that he thought the glow was a candle placed beside the image. The German heard a blunter version.3 sources3 sources

In the German's account, women in the crowd fell on him and dragged him out of the door, and men and boys helped them kill him; Góis says men of low condition dragged him out by the hair. When a second New Christian asked why they had killed him, he was beaten to death too. The first man's body was burned in the Rossio, Lisbon's great square next to the convent.2 sources2 sources

A friar then preached to the gathering crowd. Two others came out of the convent, one with a cross and one with a crucifix, shouting “Heresy, heresy!” By nightfall hundreds of people were dead.2 sources2 sources

On paper they were Christians like any other. In the street they were still “the Jews”. Many were merchants, doctors, tax farmers and skilled craftsmen, and Old Christians resented their success and doubted their faith. On Whit Sunday 1504 a gang of youths had surrounded New Christians talking in the Rua Nova, the merchants' street, and a fight broke out. Forty rioters were sentenced to flogging and exile, then pardoned when the queen intervened.4 sources4 sources

Then the plague came. Its first signs appeared in Lisbon in the autumn of 1505, after two years of unseasonable weather had brought hunger. The court left for Almeirim, Santarém and then Abrantes. By early April 1506 the epidemic was killing as many as 130 people on some days. On 15 April a penitential procession wound from the church of São Estêvão to São Domingos, and it was during the prayers that followed that people first spoke of the miracle.1 source1 source

Preachers had a ready explanation for the city's suffering. Samuel Usque, a Portuguese Jew whose history of his people's tribulations was printed at Ferrara in 1553, recalled priests saying from the pulpit, and townsmen repeating in the squares, that “any famine, plague or earthquake” that struck the land came because the New Christians “were not good Christians” and secretly practised Judaism.1 source1 source

Two days before the killing began, on the night of 17 April, someone denounced a group of New Christians who had baked Passover bread and killed lambs and hens to eat in the Jewish manner. A city judge raided the house and arrested 17 men and women; the rest escaped over the rooftops. Some were released two days later, and the German heard people grumbling that money or friends had bought their freedom and that they all deserved to burn.2 sources2 sources

The king was far away. Manuel I had gone from Abrantes towards Beja, where his mother, the Infanta Beatriz, lived, and many of Lisbon's leading men had also left to escape the plague.2 sources2 sources

On the Sunday afternoon the friars walked through the streets with their crucifix, calling on everyone who wanted to help the Christian faith to follow them. Sailors from ships anchored in the Tagus, from Holland, Zeeland, Germany and France, joined local men. Góis put the first band at more than 500. They killed every New Christian they found in the streets and threw the dead and the living together onto bonfires in the Rossio and on the riverside, the Ribeira. Slaves and boys fetched the firewood.3 sources3 sources

A city judge who came with his men to arrest the killers was driven back by a crowd shouting that if the king would not punish the Jews, God would. He escaped over the roof of his own house, and the crowd wanted to burn it. A contemporary memoir quoted by Herculano says 300 people were burned in the Rossio that afternoon, sometimes 15 or 20 at a time. Góis counted more than 500 dead by nightfall.3 sources3 sources

Monday was worse. More than a thousand local men joined the foreigners. Finding the streets empty, they broke into houses with ladders and battering poles, dragged out whole families and burned them. Góis wrote that children were torn apart and dashed against walls, and that people who had fled into churches were pulled away from the altars. Personal enemies settled scores by pointing out Old Christians as Jews.2 sources2 sources

The richest victim was João Rodrigues Mascarenhas, a New Christian tax farmer whom the crowd hated. On Sunday he had shouted insults from his window, barricaded his house and fled over the roof. On Monday afternoon he was recognised in disguise as he tried to escape by horse, and was hacked to death in an alley. The crowd dragged his body along the Rua Nova, stabbing it as they went, and carried bits of his furniture to burn him with in front of São Domingos.3 sources3 sources

The German witness took part. He and some of his countrymen saw corpses outside São Domingos only half burned for lack of wood, and each gave 100 pfennig to buy more. Mascarenhas was thrown onto their pyre. “We were glad at heart,” he wrote, because the Germans had long wished him dead. In a second pamphlet he worried that the king's penalties might fall on him and his companions too.2 sources2 sources

On Tuesday the authorities came back. Aires da Silva, the regedor, who headed the royal court of appeal, and Dom Álvaro de Castro, governor of the Casa do Cível, gathered men outside the walls near São Vicente and ordered citizens to join them on pain of losing their goods. The German put the force at about 4,000. The crowd answered that it was loyal to the king but would not fight against the cross.3 sources3 sources

Herculano wrote that the magistrates, through friars acting as go-betweens, ended the riot by promising impunity. The killing in the city died down that afternoon, Góis said, because there was nobody left to kill: honourable and pious people had hidden the surviving New Christians or helped them escape. Bands of rioters and peasants went on hunting fugitives in the villages around Lisbon, and the German's account runs to 29 April.3 sources3 sources

Nobody counted the bodies, and the figures written down in the following decades are far apart. François Soyer, a historian of the forced conversion, puts the toll anywhere between 1,000 and 4,000 men, women and children. Most estimates cluster around 2,000, and the highest come from Jewish writers and from Garcia de Resende, a courtier-poet who wrote that he saw the killing.3 sources3 sources

The German gave two numbers. His pamphlet reported that 1,930 Jews died in and around Lisbon, and a later edition added his own view that no more than 1,000 to 1,200 had died, since many had fled or hidden. Góis, writing sixty years after the events, gave more than 1,900. Isaac ibn Faraj, a New Christian who survived and later escaped to Salonica, where he returned to Judaism, gave 1,200.4 sources4 sources

Solomon ibn Verga, a Spanish Jewish exile, wrote that the killing lasted three days and took 3,000 lives, and the Castilian chronicler Andrés Bernáldez also gave 3,000. Usque gave 4,000, as did the Jewish envoys who later took their case to the pope. Herculano, writing in 1854, concluded that the memoirs of the time and the historians agreed on about 2,000 dead by Tuesday afternoon.4 sources4 sources

The news reached Manuel at Avis, in the Alentejo. Góis says he was “very sad and angry”. He at once sent the Prior of Crato and Dom Diogo Lobo, Baron of Alvito, to Lisbon with full powers to punish the guilty. After moving to Setúbal to be nearer the city, he wrote letters rebuking the regedor, the governor and the city councillors for their negligence.2 sources2 sources

The sources disagree on who was hanged. Herculano counted 40 to 50 executions after summary trials, with some of the condemned first losing their hands and others quartered. Góis wrote that most of those hanged were Portuguese, because the foreign sailors had sailed off with their loot. The German witness, who counted 42 executions between 1 and 7 May, said only eight were from Lisbon and 34 were foreigners, before an order from the king on 8 May stopped further executions.4 sources4 sources

The Dominicans of São Domingos were thrown out of their convent, which was handed to secular clergy. The German wrote that more than 42 friars left the country. According to Herculano, the two ringleaders, João Mocho, a Portuguese from Évora, and Bernardo, an Aragonese, were arrested and stripped of their orders.3 sources3 sources

The heaviest blow fell on the city as a whole. In a sentence signed at Setúbal on 22 May 1506, which Góis copied word for word into his chronicle, Manuel blamed the people of Lisbon both for the killings and for failing to stop them.2 sources2 sources

The council sent one of its members to beg for mercy. Manuel replied that the world needed an example of rigour, against the atrocities of the wicked and against the negligence of everyone else. The German, whose sympathies were with the rioters, feared that if the decree were enforced people would flee the city and the countryside.2 sources2 sources

The king's anger cooled within months, but he also changed course on the New Christians. A law of 1 March 1507 repealed the ban on their leaving the kingdom, let them sell their property and move their money abroad, and promised that no further special laws would be made against those who stayed. On 13 March the 1497 promise that nobody would inquire into their beliefs was solemnly renewed.1 source1 source

Few took the chance. Herculano, citing a later New Christian memorial to the pope, says that almost none left, held back by their businesses and their attachment to the country. He judged the years from 1507 to Manuel's death in 1521 a time of relative peace for them, with the crown enforcing their protection.2 sources2 sources

The peace did not last. In 1531, after an earthquake shook Lisbon and the Tagus valley, friars in Santarém preached that it was God's punishment for Portugal's sins, and the playwright Gil Vicente wrote to João III that after the first sermon the New Christians went about “dying of fear of the people”. In 1536 the pope granted João III the Inquisition he had asked for, and its main target from the start was Judaism among the New Christians.2 sources2 sources

Europe had heard about the massacre at once. The German's account was printed in at least three editions, and two Spanish chroniclers who never mentioned the forced conversions of 1497 gave the massacre whole chapters. The Jewish historians Ibn Verga and Usque made it a chapter in the long story of their people's sufferings.3 sources3 sources

For centuries Lisbon had no public marker of the killing. In 2006, the 500th anniversary, people gathered in the Largo de São Domingos, the square in front of the church, and Esther Mucznik, a leader of Lisbon's Jewish community, regretted that the city still had no monument to the persecution of the Jews.1 source1 source

That changed in April 2008, when two monuments were unveiled in the square, organised by the city council with the Jewish and Catholic communities. One is a memorial designed by Graça Bachmann at the proposal of the Jewish community: a tilted stone hemisphere carved with a Star of David, on a base inscribed with a verse from the Book of Job. Sources give its inauguration as 19 or 23 April 2008.4 sources4 sources

Beside it, in front of the church door, another monument marks the place where in 2000 the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, José Policarpo, expressed the Church's shame for the persecution of the Inquisition. Since 2015 Portugal has also let descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews apply for citizenship, though the rules have since been tightened.4 sources4 sources

The massacre is still argued over. In 2024 the Jewish Community of Porto released a short film reconstructing the events, “1506: O Genocídio de Lisboa”, and at a screening the audience divided over whether to call it a genocide or a massacre. Richard Zimler's novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon is set during those April days.2 sources2 sources