The Jesuit Father Francisco Garau with his book La Fee Triunfante, had a great importance in the perpetuation of the "xueta" (Jewish converts) question. The selected excerp explains why this place from El Terreno was chosen.
He ordered a bonfire eighty foot square and eight foot high to be built, erecting twenty-five posts there, in good proportion, with their plank seats for those who were to be garrotted, instructing the provision of sufficient firewood for such a great fire. For this purpose, he chose a barren piece of land that stretched from Lazareto, on the seashore, to the slopes of the hill described as belonging to Bellver Castle. It was chosen for its size and distance from the city, so that the stench of its smoke would not be smelt. Although others wrongly interpreted Divine Providence’s absence, it did in fact gently decree, to the Prisoners’ disillusionment, that they should die in almost the same place that they had chosen to embark on their flight. And let those who are yet to come and those who remain know that God is skilled at making bonfires for burning those who seek the treachery of escape by sailing away and persisting in their perversity.
La Fee Triunfante (The Triumphant Faith), 1691
Translated by Rachel Waters.
(Girona, 1640 – Barcelona, 1701). A Jesuit, theologian and writer, Father Francesc Garau was head of theology at Barcelona’s Jesuit school and headmaster of the Urgell, Mallorca and Zaragoza schools. He collaborated with the Inquisition as an inquisitor.
He forged a prestigious reputation at the time for his literary work and was thus commissioned to write a book on the autos-da-fé that took place in Mallorca in 1691, when 37 “xuetes” (converted Jews) whom he helped to try were put to death.
The book, La Fee Triunfante (The Triumphant Faith), played an important role in perpetuating racial hatred of the island’s “xuetes” and some authors hold him solely responsible for this. Strangely, four editions of La Fee Triunfante have been published: in 1691, and others in 1755, 1931 and 1984. In his book Los Xuetes (1969), Baltasar Porcel wrote: "The 1961 Autos-da-Fé. One of the most staggering books in our cultural world is a legacy of these events: La Fe Triunfante en Quatro Autos (The Triumphant Faith in Four Autos), made up of 123 pages. Canon Tarongí, that great defender of the “xuetes”, issued a blunt opinion in his impassioned caustic book Algo sobre el estado religioso y social de la Isla de Mallorca (About the Island of Mallorca’s Religious and Social State), published in 1877: "for two hundred years, the book La Fe Triunfante has been the main cause of one Mallorcan group’s preoccupation with the other."
La Fe Triunfante describes the four autos-da-fé held on March 7th, May 1st, May 6th and July 2nd 1691, when 88 prisoners were tried for persisting in believing in Judaism.
We have chosen an extract that reports on the choice of El Terreno as the site. It also demonstrates the biased nature of the account, written as propaganda to showhow the rebels were punished and some model prisoners were granted holy redemption.
El Terreno is a Palma neighbourhood whose lands belonged to Bellver Castle in the Middle Ages. Today it stands below the castle, with buildings that have gradually changed its initial morphology. In the 18th century, El Terreno estate, from which its name derives, was registered as belonging to Cardinal Despuig. With the purchase of estates and division of their land, a process of urban development began. Combined with the construction of new roads, as from the mid 19th century it gradually led to the consolidation of this residential area. El Terreno has been a home to artists and writers, who transformed it into an important nucleus for artists.
